Navigation
This entry is about my on-going project (be)longing which looks at themes of race, heritage, transracial adoption and estrangement. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.
I had a good catch up with my friend and artist Tom Isaacs this week in Sydney (him, not me, sadly). We were talking about islands and I came back to these thoughts:
The romanticism of islands: longing for solitude, tropical, distant, far away, time to oneself.
Loneliness of islands: solitude tipping into isolation. An island of one.
Clusters of islands: a collection of islands (archipelago), swimming between islands but always returning to our own.
Open waters: the journey between islands, the journey others take to our island, the danger of leaving our island and uncertainty of if we will be able to return.
It made me think a lot about navigation and maps. I have dyscalculia (“a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers which can lead to a diverse range of difficulties with mathematics“). Numbers are my nemesis. This week I was looking something up related to dyscalculia and one of the symptoms listed was struggling with a sense of direction, or being able to follow navigational directions. This is something that has plagued me since I was a child. It isn’t about getting my right and left mixed up (which I am fine with), but about being able to follow directions that involve navigating through or to a space (i.e a series of directions to cycle to arrive at a destination). I rely constantly on Google Maps because I seem to have a non-existent spatial memory or internal navigation system.
It caused me such anxiety as a child not only because I am terrible at maths and had a tyrant for a teacher, but because it really impacted my journeys to places. Despite taking the same public bus to school for five years I still had anxiety about when to get off of the bus. On my trips into London as a teenager I could cope with the tube, but taking a bus struck deep fear and panic into me, because I couldn’t know when to press the bell to get off of the bus. It felt so hard to explain to people why taking a bus, like a normal person, was impossible. No matter how many times I visited the same place, my memory of the journey seemed non-existent despite my visual memory being able to pinpoint landmarks once I was there.
This got me thinking so much about navigation, and maps, which of course I struggle with. Maps are fantastic resources, but only if you have the knowledge of how they work and the capacity to read them. What happens to those that can’t or struggle to understand the encoded symbols?
I have started re-working back into these images of islands to create contour maps. Something that I find fascinating about contour maps is that not everything is revealed - layers are hidden and revealed based on depth of the land. If islands are bodies, of land, or in my case human bodies, I love the notion that different maps may reveal the hidden layers within us.
I then started thinking about how much I like drawing (or in my case more making marks, since I can’t ‘draw’ as people would expect). The maps, once in this format, are kind of my own form of drawing. Jumping between processes - inks > photography > digital > back to print. I love the fine dots and textures in them. I also love that in this format there are parts of land that just disappear, as if tides have washed in and created islands within islands.
