Playing All Over the Map

With the freedom of play, we explore. Toys are some of the earliest ways I began to explain the world to myself. Touch them and sort them, think about texture and color. Make families, act out dramas, and make a world. Maps, too, give us a way to extend ourselves and reach to what is out there, close to home or far away. It is not just what is north or west, there is scale, from the tiniest bug to almost unimaginable galaxies. What is near and what is so far away that the light can only reach us in millions of years?

Maps talk about how we think about space and place in abstract visual language and show what we think of our world at any given time. Maps help us explore what it means to have a place on the planet. Our language for the physical universe, from deep space to subatomic string theory, is evolving. How is our visual language changing to bridge this gigantic stretch of conceptual space in which we now live?

This work started with play. Combining toys with a local topographical map, weather maps, a nautical map, and star maps, I think about our place in space. Starting here opens larger questions about space and place in the biggest sense.