Body of Water

Body of Water extracts numerous rivers, lakes and inlets from the Tasmanian landscape and transforms them into paper form creating a complex, abstract network suggestive of a living circulatory system.

These bodies of water follow, approximately, their locations within the island. However, the certainty, factuality and permanence of cartography has been subverted. Scale has been manipulated, rivers redirected and interlinked and lakes relocated in fictional ways.

This transformation illustrates the organic nature of what lies behind the meticulous static lines documented over centuries of Western map making. These forms are changeable and adaptable. They are fluid and malleable. Temperatures rise and fall, levels ebb and flow, directions change. They swell, flow, pulse, retract and have the power to erode.

But teamed with that power is a fragility. We live in an interconnected and interdependent network, a living system where our actions have ramifications.