Final Map Project: Work In Progress

As I am finishing up working on my final project, I thought I should introduce some of the ideas I've been putting together to see if they actually make sense in the big picture! I have looked at a few artists who have used maps as inspiration for their artwork (2 of them I mention below) and really took pieces of ideas from each of them to create my final map of Saint Mary's. I was very interested in using paths as a narration of my Saint Mary's College experience with a dog. Sophomore year I moved off campus and rescued a black lab mix puppy from the local animal shelter. My experience of college without a dog and then with a dog is really drastically different and so I wanted to somehow represent this new life I sort of came into when I got Lilah. 

I was pretty stressed out Freshman year and homesick (I never went home bc I live in NJ and had no car). I had some fun but for the most part  I was pretty sad and lonely Freshman year of college. In October of Sophomore year, I got Lilah at 3 months old and from then on I've had the best college experience. I was always running around trying to find people to watch her when I was in class, starting to train her in my free time, going for walks with her when I needed to relax, and cuddled with her when I was lonely. I loved coming home to her because she was always so happy to see me and I knew she depended on me and trusted me. She was like my security blanket and she never failed to make me smile and ease my stress.

I wanted to take this concept of feeling happy and stress free and relate it to acupuncture, something I have recently gotten really into. The different body meridians that energy flows through captivates me. It boggles my mind how just pressure on certain tiny points along these meridians releases an array of positive feelings and energy. This same type of a energy and feelings I get through acupuncture are what I feel like my college experience has been like with Lilah. I decided to use the 12 main meridians as pathways for representing the paths her and I travel on daily, and numerous times a day. We have gotten to know the roads and trails around her pretty well. For places that we spend the most idol time (at home and where she likes to go to the bathroom) I use Chinese symbols that display a movie of what that spot looks like from Lilah's point of view. I decided I wanted this map to look like a notebook or journal where I write down important places and information as I go along learning. 

This project is almost done and I am still working out the kinks of this idea but this is the general and summarized version of what I have been doing!