All the World
I began this series while on an artist residency in a small town in Quebec where I started learning French, and it was inspired by the phrase tout le monde meaning 'everyone'. It seemed so extravagant, so excessive, this idea of 'all the world', and I thought about how this notion of the 'whole world', is something that we can never genuinely represent or even conceive of. Cartography, like language, is always an abstraction. It renders the world comprehensible whilst distancing us from direct experience of it, we live through its mediation. For this project I asked people to draw a map of the world from memory or imagination, and photographed them in their own domestic space with the finished drawing.
I am interested in how the shapes of the continents are so familiar to us that we can discern them from the vaguest of outlines, and yet few of us will ever see these forms in real life, from such a distance. The conundrum of how to accurately plot our spherical earth on a flat piece of paper is one that has still has not been resolved. How maps are drawn, and indeed their very existence, has always been politically loaded and tied up with the concept of ownership.
