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Becoming Familiar With Movement

Mixed media on paper, 2023

This triptych aestheticizes the process of exploring and familiarizing oneself with a physical environment. Starting with a chipboard model of a campus-like space and a rock randomly positioned, a friend was told to close her eyes and, using a pen placed vertically in her hand, move through the space until she located the rock. We did this three times with three different rock locations and three different starting points. Her lines were then superimposed onto one another in various orders. The first in the series are her second and third runs, the third are her first and third, and the middle merges all three.

When you move to a new city, it’s extremely difficult to absorb its geographical layout from only looking at a map, no matter how long one stares at either it. One must traverse it oneself, repeatedly, in order to conceptualize the environment in full. How can one understand their physical environment through only movement? How can that movement be reimagined to create a new space? How do we route the spaces we move through and why?