In June I bought 4 soil maps. In October I walked 351, 393 feet.
My interests and ways of thinking lie not only in the arts and creative creation, but also in the sciences and analyzed data. In an attempt to marry these two aspects of interest together, I’ve practised beginning my art making process solely with inspiration from data collection and measurements. I then carry forth these inspirations with the artistic side of my mind, and using creative thinking, I slowly morph them into pieces of art that are often abstract.
October Walking is a way of creating something tangible from something that isn’t. This piece is the distance I walked for the month of October. Wearing an Apple Watch for the entire month made it easy to calculate how many steps I had taken. I then multiplied that number of steps by the length of my stride to get the total distance: 351, 393 feet. Using a neutral colour of thread donated to me by Cansew Inc., a Canadian company, I was able to physically represent the concept of distance in a round, dense, mysterious and unusual heap. The neutral colour is used to emphasize the thread’s length, instead of the thread itself, and the loose form the material takes on contradicts the very rigid and precise process of counting steps with technology. Unravelling the string delicately, as well as tearing apart the spools with my fingers, were two of the techniques I used to create the mass. This process put into perspective just how far you can travel by foot in a relatively short amount of time.
My interest in the sciences lies mostly around physical geography and the environment. Soiled began from using preexisting information—maps of agricultural soil types from different parts of Canada. Already an abstract of the land itself, I further abstracted the maps by exploiting the contour lines based simply on the fact that I had become obsessed with them. Various mark making equipment—pen, marker, pastel, chalk—in many colours were used on trace paper to create the lines. Drawing by looking, tracing directly on the maps, and blowing them up on a projector to play with scale, all contributed to my exploration. After scanning each line drawing into the computer, I tweaked their transparencies and overlapped them—much like how the layering of soil occurs on land. This is my way of expressing the beauty and “artness” of something that typically isn’t represented as beautiful or as art.
With these works I have created pieces that are an expression of the landscape; maps and walking speak to movement, to distance, and to time. Both stem from information either already created, or that which I’ve collected myself, and rest at a place that I hope will interest the viewer in some way.
My interests and ways of thinking lie not only in the arts and creative creation, but also in the sciences and analyzed data. In an attempt to marry these two aspects of interest together, I’ve practised beginning my art making process solely with inspiration from data collection and measurements. I then carry forth these inspirations with the artistic side of my mind, and using creative thinking, I slowly morph them into pieces of art that are often abstract.
October Walking is a way of creating something tangible from something that isn’t. This piece is the distance I walked for the month of October. Wearing an Apple Watch for the entire month made it easy to calculate how many steps I had taken. I then multiplied that number of steps by the length of my stride to get the total distance: 351, 393 feet. Using a neutral colour of thread donated to me by Cansew Inc., a Canadian company, I was able to physically represent the concept of distance in a round, dense, mysterious and unusual heap. The neutral colour is used to emphasize the thread’s length, instead of the thread itself, and the loose form the material takes on contradicts the very rigid and precise process of counting steps with technology. Unravelling the string delicately, as well as tearing apart the spools with my fingers, were two of the techniques I used to create the mass. This process put into perspective just how far you can travel by foot in a relatively short amount of time.
My interest in the sciences lies mostly around physical geography and the environment. Soiled began from using preexisting information—maps of agricultural soil types from different parts of Canada. Already an abstract of the land itself, I further abstracted the maps by exploiting the contour lines based simply on the fact that I had become obsessed with them. Various mark making equipment—pen, marker, pastel, chalk—in many colours were used on trace paper to create the lines. Drawing by looking, tracing directly on the maps, and blowing them up on a projector to play with scale, all contributed to my exploration. After scanning each line drawing into the computer, I tweaked their transparencies and overlapped them—much like how the layering of soil occurs on land. This is my way of expressing the beauty and “artness” of something that typically isn’t represented as beautiful or as art.
With these works I have created pieces that are an expression of the landscape; maps and walking speak to movement, to distance, and to time. Both stem from information either already created, or that which I’ve collected myself, and rest at a place that I hope will interest the viewer in some way.