Maps stem from our curiosity (or anxiety) about the spaces around us, lead us to interrogate and explore them and then, through a process of definition and delineation, become a way of controlling those spaces as well.

The artwork that I’ve been making for the last 5 years has been centered on an exploration of my personal landscape – home, family, and memory.  I use mapping as a means of understanding my evolving relationship with home.

As for my current memory mapping pieces, I find myself drawn deeper and deeper into my memories of childhood.  As I think about and plan for my future, I envision for myself and for my son and wife the same sort of joyous family life I had growing up.  Or at least that I remember.

For the past several months, I have been creating small memory maps of my family history and childhood life.  These have been informal, hand-drawn thought pieces of a sort – how did the size of my boyhood rooms compare to my siblings, what routes did I take on a daily basis while in elementary school, how did the size of my paper route change as I got older, etc.  My family moved to a new town every 5 or 6 years (my father is in the ministry), so my associations with my childhood seem to be centered around movement, explorations, fleeting interpersonal relationships, new buildings, etc.  Throughout this, my family was my solid core of familiarity – my baseline, so to speak. 

Now, as an adult with a son and new wife, I find myself drawn again and again to memories of my childhood.  Creating these memory maps forces me into a continuously renewing relationship with my personal history.  And the relationship with my history forces me into an evaluative relationship with my current ‘history’ and expectations for my future. 

I’ve found that, through mapping, I am creating the world that I want to live in.  The memories that I’ve classified and interpreted, the value system that I’ve charted out, the plans, ambitions, and historical data that I’ve enumerated and organized are having an impact on my expectations for the landscape of my life. 

In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi writes that “even by choosing the language in which we will write - we are defining, delineating, the world that is coming into being.” 

We map out the space we want to live in and, because we mapped it out, we get to live there.