MAPS

"Researching historical maps and recreating them in my own style has been a long-time interest. More recently, I have been incorporating maps into my painting practice, using historical maps of lutruwita/Tasmania and Naarm/Melbourne as the inspiration for new artworks in a range of formats. The process begins with research: finding maps of places of significance to me and the broader community in online archives. I specifically look for maps that reveal the beauty of traditional cartography in their depiction of the natural environment, which are often described as 'sketch maps' From here, I digitally edit or 'remix' these maps by removing human-made details like roads, buildings, property boundaries and land allotments. The edited maps highlight and reveal natural features like rivers, mountains, bushland and coastlines and form the basis for my paintings, which are developed as single panel and multi-panel monochromatic paintings of various shapes and sizes, depending on area of land represented. Some paintings are recognisable as known places, others appear as more abstract interpretations of the original cartographer's mark making.

The first map painting I completed was for my own home; a wall-sized map of the land around my property Hunting Ground in the Southern Midlands of lutruwita/Tasmania. This mural painting was completed in situ, using an 1840s map of a section of the Shire of Monmouth as source material. I was struck by the beauty of the cartographic representation of the hills and vegetation, and so this new painting practice was born. In this case, I worked directly from a large printed map which was gifted to me from a neighbour.