This series of animations and videos explore themes of temporality, fragility, collapse and regeneration in our shape-shifting constructs of home and the world.

A hand appears with an inked brush over the surface of water and attempts to draw the image of a boat. As the boat mutates and dissolves, the attempt is repeated over and over again. The insistence of the action in imprinting a form upon a field that refuses to hold it, finally results in a swirling, black cloud of dispersed ink.

A soluble-paper and thread model of a home, hovers above the surface of slowly rising waters, awaiting its inevitable dissolution into flailing strings reminiscent of roots searching for a stable hold.

A set of video triptychs feature the rising and falling of drawn and embroidered world-maps as documented by selected cartographers (list below) across the centuries. Appearing on translucent, soluble veils, the maps begin to mutate, dissolve and resolve themselves into new forms, new understandings of the world. One set of movements play with reflection, duality, lines of force, mandala-like patterns of energy  and a flower-like unfurling of world images. Another set of movements play with effort and labour in the constructed world-image, that appears stitch by embroidered stitch. As one image of the world collapses another rises. Occasionally there is a total entropic breakdown of the old world-image, and a return to a smouldering, raw, unordered state of its original material (thread and ink).

Spurred by desire to find our place in the world, to have agency in navigating a potentially threatening environment, to control, acquire, conquer, grasp more of the world or simply – to understand and map “home”, we have created many images of the world. Currently on the cusp of a shifting world rhythm, highlighted by climate change and polarising politics, many questions erupt. Will we re-imagine our stories or configure them back into the same pattern again? Will there be a shapeshifting of our ideologies, our relationship to time, to nature and to the environment? Will the old images linger on?

135 BCE: Map by Posidonius
035 CE: Anglo-Saxon Coon World Map
1050 CE: Beatus of Liébana’s “Mappa Mundi”
11th Century: Map by Al-Idrisi
14th Century: Pietro Vesconte
19th Century: Map from Jain cosmology
1609: Shanhai-Yudi-Quantu
21st Century World Maps