2010, India ink on paper, 52"w x 66"h
My interest in wordless narratives and visual scripts began with the picture book. Like many children, I combed through storybook collections for wordless stories like Anno’s Journey by Mitsumasa Anno and The Snow Man by Raymond Briggs. Visual storytelling provided more than precursory steps toward conventional literature; like most children, I could discern a narrative from the sequence of images. But also like most children, my narrative from these images changed in a way the textual narrative did not. Comprehension did not depend on a learned vocabulary of abstract letterforms but relied more on an internalization of representational language.
Years later I discovered imaginative cartography which provides a similar type of reading experience. These creative maps organize the information of experience with complex nonlinear narratives of place and self. Drawn in by the intuitive and analytical readings of visual languages that required the individual experience of the reader, I began inventing cartographies of my own. These hybrids of map and illustration function as scripts or preconditions to spaces that feel intuitively familiar yet — with logical analysis — unknown and disorienting.
This large-scale piece employs a basic language of mark-making that suggests narrative possibilities without offering the mechanisms for decoding, engaging and displacing the viewer with an illusive internal logic.
A Daimler Company
