Lost Rivers

Cracks in the World Series

Over the past few years, I have been expanding my idea about body and place through photographing cracks in pavements, footpaths and stonework from various historical sites. Some of these photographs are transformed into stencils, others are used as direct references for drawings. Occasionally I make rubbings directly from the actual cracks.

“Cracks in the world” series explores the notion of drawing as an act of thinking and doing. It explores place (through erasure, observation and mapping), moment (the drawing bears witness to the human presence through the bodily movements that create the marks) and memory (the erasure of the marks reflects the dissolving of time and place - forgotten places and times).

Each drawing has a starting point from my personal collection of maps and is a continuation of my research into the relationship between the body and place. These drawings are a palimpsest of maps; they are cultural markers of place, time and history.

In these drawings the city and the body become mapped onto one another. The city leaves its imprint upon the body as much as the body leaves its imprint upon the city. The maps act as a found object that inspires, borrows from, transforms, a new reading and reinterpretation that discover new systems and relationships. They are redrawn and re-imaged and act as metaphors for the human lived experiences. They are symbolic of dislocation, order and chaos, history and time.

Maps give order, the idea to know where we are going and where we have been. They give order to the chaos of contemporary living. Interwoven with the maps are mundane, everyday objects and accidental markings of broken floor tiles, cracks in pavements, produced from wear and tear or by nature trying to take back the earth, capture moments in time and histories. The marks and stains suggest topographical maps and linear networks. The stains are the artist’s gesture: the immediate, the chance, the chaos within the order of a map. The scale of the drawings adds to the lived experience. The act of drawing is in turn a bodily experience.

Lisa Jones 2015

Glossary

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