Mary Stuart Walker

We are all familiar with the wooden stakes and neon tags of survey markers, indications of property that are invisible without the help of lines superimposed on a map. As land is partitioned into lots that can sold as capital, those shapes become abstractions of the places they represent. Landownership involves a collection of rights to the resources the land provides rather that the envelope of space that appears on a map. Site Plans examines the inadequacy of the two dimensional representation of land. Using different plots of land as the basis for unique screen prints, the original shapes are manipulated in three dimensional space to create new configurations and layered to construct a multidimensional map. The authority of the bird’s eye view we accept as empirical only tells part of the story of space. Site Plans is a qualitative approach to map making that embraces the abstraction of representation.