“…Maps provide the very conditions of possibility for the worlds we inhabit and the subjects we become.”

— John Pickles, from A History of Spaces

All creative practice is a recombining of old ideas to facilitate new ones. Mapping is no different; it is a process of overlaying and merging ideas about the world back upon the world to create new ways of seeing. In my studio, I am both artist and cartographer. My background as an environmentalist shapes my worldview and it is from this place that the maps of my imagination emerge.

I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to create maps that prioritize river networks. In the Haw River Drawing series, I have eliminated all of the man-made structures by which we usually locate ourselves, leaving only the river network to contemplate. What at first might seem disorienting leads to the possibility of re-orienting, of identifying with and within this natural system. My other mapping projects, Point/Source and Political/Hydrological, expose our current relationship with rivers and imagine alternate paths for the social and physical structures we have built upon them. By giving priority to rivers, not as resources to be exploited, but as an integral part of the health of a social/biological system, I hope to provoke dialogue and stimulate change around how we construct both the physical and social landscapes in which we live.

Lauren Rosenthal