After searching online for different sources to use for my map project, I stumbled across a bunch of artists or both make their own maps for artistic purposes, but also use maps for inspiration and material in their artwork. Shauna McMullan is the creator of the artwork pictured here. It is called Dislocations and is an installation piece McMullan created using maps that have a personal meaning to her. Finding road maps of cities and "topography of metropolitan centres", she uses these maps as materials that she physically manipulates through cutting them up, rearranging them, and hollowing them out. These maps she has collected of four places in particular. These are places McMullan has lived and include Ireland, Mainland Britain, France, and the USA. The mutilated maps are suspended by glass rods giving them a transparent and opaque visual appearance.
What first drew me to this piece of work were its visual qualities. The lines, shapes, and shadows this piece creates is extremely captivating and I found it to be mysterious, pushing me to figure out what it was all about. As I read about McMullan's process in creating this piece of work, I became even more attracted to it. She focuses on one thing in particular, places she has lived, and begins pulling these places apart, putting them together, and forcing them to be something together they never would have been. McMullan's fresh take on map making is inspirational and I hope to use some of her ideas as sources for coming up with my own ideas for this project.
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