When I study history in this way, I try to choose images that hold some unspoken fascination. I was, and still am, drawn in by the translucency of the color, the delicacy of the mark making, and how those things combine with a map as an expression of  "fact". In many ways it's a perfect image for the time period. So many contradictions are implied: pastoralism versus absolutism, delicacy paired with authority. Reason paired with romance. Unobstructed beauty owned by the few. Property owned at the expense of who? I knew that in a few short years from its making, this place would no longer exist in the way its map maker had conceived it. Yet in 21st century America, these contradictions were still playing out.

I'd spent my career drafting architecture, and for this project, turned those skills to drafting for the body. This is the first in a series of figures that tell a story of exploration, crisis, and re-emergence. Couture drafting techniques allow for a precise fit, and speak to the rich visual and decorative arts culture from which the 1765 map emerged.

I plan to return to the figures, but at this moment, I became intensely interested in the pattern detailing on the side of the body. I drew it in response to the map; how land was divided, what was surface, what was beneath, what was beautiful, what was awful. I had just finished treatment for breast cancer, and realized then that a facet of my inquiry was existential. These pattern pieces had a story to tell, beyond and in addition to the historical one.

Searching for meaning in the drafted shapes, I began to do what any designer would do. I looked for clues in spatial associations. I took the shapes generated from the garment drafting process, and scattered them into compositions to see if they could yield a new understanding.

I struggled! How could I make something if it didn't exist for some function? The designer in me rebelled for quite a while. Not content with a 2D composition, I tried to relate the work back to the body. But jewelry felt too...obvious. Too easy. It never moved beyond a mock up.

A direction towards jewelry felt unsatisfying. It related to the body, but wasn't telling a story of how it related to the body. This spatial solution, with pieces scattered behind, yet being dragged forward, suggested destruction, fate, the pieces we must work with- our past and therefore the elements of the future we must build. 

Now that I had a provisional understanding of what the shapes were, a material language began to evolve. Expressed in materials, the shapes began to point to a personality. I wanted them to evoke luxury, skin, bondage. I wanted to disconnect the material references from any moment in time, so that they could be as relevant as possible to any inquiry or set of assumptions about contradiction and narrative. The goal was to remain open and beautiful, if somewhat frightening- like the 1765 map.

Now that I had a "function", and a material language, I began to work on refining the piece. I found the mannequin distracting, and instead chose to install the chain at hand height, suggesting that the viewer could easily pick it up. If this was indeed a stand in for fate/future and the elements of past and present that make it, the shapes do belong to everyone to take in hand. This is true from a political stance and from a personal one.  

Designers are frequently interested in what makes something a "thing", and I am no different. I got curious at this point about the expandability of the piece, and the fact that it could be read as a whole even though it wasn't connected. It became an experiment testing Heidegger's concept of the Thing, and of Derrida's understanding of possible emergent events. Ontology is something that preoccupies my entire practice.

A map is something that is supposed to make a claim for meaning and set one truth above others. From this vantage point in history though, we see how fickle meaning can be, both in socio-historical terms and in personal terms. In the final work, the loose construction suggests the sensuality of the Rococo, but also reveals its unresolvable tensions. Shadows matter as much as conventional materials. Connections are almost irrelevant. However, the elements that make up that mapped meaning are concretely identifiable. It is up to us to arrange them in such ways as we see fit. 

After a moment of crisis, how will we pick them up next?

The image Benjamin conjured, published in 1940, has been something I've been unable to shake. Our inability to turn away from trauma, to move past events, causes further destruction on a personal and socio-historical level. How do we turn? Is turning a form of survival? 

I think Benjamin's storm must be felt before we can move past it.This charcoal drawing, one of a series investigating different perspective views on the horizon, came out of me very quickly. I loved it, but as charcoal on trace paper, I knew it wasn't "finished".  

While I waited for a solution, the storm kept popping up any time I moved my hand. Here it became what I think of as a family portrait, three figures bound in grief.

Something about the identification of the storm with the figure allowed me to trust the lines and make this sculpture. This is 24' of 1/4" copper wire spray painted black and suspended from the ceiling. I bent it by laying it on the ground and wrapped, pushed, and pulled using a shipping tube for resistance. It was an intensely physical process that challenged ideas of "storm" and articulated them into rage and grief. Now a figure? Now a storm? You meet it at eye level.