For about a year I have had a Sondheim quote above my art-making table. it says:
the world has always been chaotic, life is unpredictable, there is no form. Making forms gives you solidity.
Stephen Sondheim, Fresh Air, April 2021
I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end
So when Nicola gave me four fabulous big electoral boundary books it seemed the appropriate quote to play with through its pages, given electoral boundaries are very much forms we have imposed or created to organise stuff. And of course it has maps, but the map not being the territory…
My plan is to do something similar to what I did with the Lemony Snicket books with these 4 books. Essentially I kept the covers and made different forms inside them. So they look the same until you open them.
I have begun by making a Cricut stencil and inking it on to many many pages of maps. Then I joined the maps, and added a scroll I had made from Atlas and National Geographic images many months ago. This isn’t the actual scroll, nor is this, so maybe I never photographed the two i added here, but it is similar, and is from Aug 21, and it’s now Nov 22, so yes, a year or so ago!
Together they look a bit like this:
I have since added more to the whole thing, the full Sondheim quote and such. I’ll post another set of images when I bring it to another place.
