Making a map

In the catalogue to the exhibition LOST the artist and curator, Tania Kovats uses a series of objects to orientate some of her thinking behind the exhibition. The short paragraphs she uses touch upon larger themes with precision, the writing feeling distilled and clear.

Through a seemingly unconnected series of things, a map of sorts is created. This map takes in historical and whimsical objects, collected and sorted accumulations of landscape images, close ups of the edges of Renaissance stone carvings and old guide books and books of reference, a clue here perhaps.

In her collection of images and short writings, I see links to the writer Kathleen Jamie and her crafted and resonant essays. By focusing on the close at hand, the local and the tangible, Jamie opens to explore themes of global management, ideas of displacement and cultural and geographical belonging.

This therefore, becomes an opportunity to use objects to orientate practice rather than images or words directly. This clarifies to me how I think through practice, through a piecing together of objects who feel unrelated but somehow familial to each other, like second cousins, twice removed.

Kovats, T. (2000). Lost. Birmingham: Ikon Gallery.