MadeScapes and all that part4
and is far better described by Trevor Smith
You have arrived at your destination
Topographic Translation
Bristol Diving School, Bristol. Oct 2011.
In advance of my journey here, I entered the postcode of Bristol Diving School into Google and clicked maps. I was then able to preview my entire route, culminating in the approach along Cumberland Road and the turn-off into Hanover Place. I even picked out the best place to park my car. Forty eight minutes later, as my satnav correctly predicted, I arrived at my destination. Entering the gallery I found an exhibition floor-plan: every step of my journey had been mapped out before me; from the moment I pulled off my driveway, to my arrival in front of each specific artwork.
Maps are ubiquitous. It is no surprise that mapping finds its way into the work of many artists; a map informs our experience of a space, the elements within it and the relationships between those elements, and in doing so, a map removes the element of surprise. By examining a map in advance of its represented location, mankind has been able to plan great expeditions; proud parents have navigated theme parks, and scientists have selected the best locations for landing robot explorers on distant worlds. Not all maps are representative of the physical features of a landscape; in medieval times a map was a tool of the tax-collector, containing information such as land ownership and resource production, it allowed him to keep tabs on which citizens owed how much; a matter of far greater importance than the relative location and dimensions of buildings, borders and pathways.
Nic Marshall’s two plinth-works, 51.446104, -2.599461 and 51.44838, -2.593282, conflate the frame and the work into a single object. Sections of earth appear cookie-cut, miniaturised and dropped into the gallery space. Atop the plinths sit moor-like landscapes of places that should have names like Jacobs Ladder and Devils Dyke. A quick revisit to Google maps reveals the titular grid references to be Bristolian locations; one a few hundred yards up the road, the other right here in the gallery itself. From the detrital matter of the city – metal piping, rubble and dust – the artist has fashioned the visual clues that remove us to these semi-fictional landscapes.
Tom Johnson’s topographical works never go as far as sticking a pin in a map; rather he redirects the established visual language of landscape and mapping to create believable yet indistinct locations. The lack of any concrete referent has the viewer thinking they may have been there; our mental visual reference-libraries contain fictional sceneries, constituted of the many landscapes we have stood in, or looked upon. It is to these places that we go when we gaze on such works, whose pixelated appearance imparts a digital quality that is set against the brutal honesty of their rudimentary framing. MDF board and untreated timbers as supports for the work are also used in Re-iterated Geography. Three large-scale map drawings are removed of identifying factors such as place-names and coastlines, again allowing the viewer room to set themselves within the topography. Any urge one feels to look up these maps in the accompanying AA Illustrated Road Atlas of France is dashed by the artists positioning of another block of timber, across the book, nailed to its plinth.
Perhaps the most literal map presented here is Lizzie Cannon’s Interstitial; a 1:1 depiction of a section of pavement. The scope of the piece appears to have been determined by natural limiting factors such as the artists reach, and the interruptions of her jutting knees or feet. This 1:1 map is elevated to the gallery wall, opposed to Poppy Pitt’s Impressions; a series of hanging plaster casts with the appearance of fleshy appendages – one can almost make out the curve of a hip or buttock – but as the title of the work implies, these appear to be casts of the hollows created when a body leaves a space. Lined by a faint striping of red fibres, the casts bear a trace of a large sheet of fabric, perhaps bed linen. Impressions constitutes an altogether different kind of mapping to the other works in the show; it is a mapping of the echoes of human spatial interaction; the traces left when a body is removed from a surface as forgiving as a duvet cover. Which brings us back to topography; for who among us has never looked out over our bed-sheets and imagined a miniature landscape unfolding before them? Each night, as we settle into our beds, our shifting bodies conspire beneath the surface to create new landscapes of hills, ridges and glacial valleys for our imaginations to discover.
As I drove home in the darkness of the evening, I noticed that my satnav could see a greater extent of the road ahead than I could make out with the headlamps of the car. I was reminded of Jacques Luis Borges, and his fable of the ancient civilisation that became so obsessed with map-making that they elevated its status to the most important job in the land. Maps of increasing accuracy were commissioned, until eventually the entire territory was covered in a map on a 1:1 scale. Such was the importance placed on the upkeep of this most revered status symbol of empire, that beneath it the civilisation crumbled.
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