Scar Map

We are never completely removed from the animate landscape, but rather inscribed in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths. Engage with the landscape of your body from a different angle and perspective. Find yourself in a world that speaks through your body's experience.

The process

I designed a process for discovering how our bodies and landscapes can hold and heal stories and memory. By inviting people to talk about a scar or injury on their body, choosing an artifact to act as a guide and taking a walk into nature, people found metaphors in the environment to address their own stories of change, alteration, and transformation. The stories were then documented with GPS, photos and collected artifacts and mapped in Google Earth.

In this series, Ben is telling me about his wrist, held together by a metal plate since a skateboarding accident. He identified the ski lift on Mt. Norquay with it's metal struts driven into the land to be an accurate metaphor for his feeling about this. In his narrative, he references connections to technology and organic matter, with adjustment to intrusions.

In the final installation, edited audio tracks were embedded in a body built of earth, and triggered with pressure and light sensors - a playful way to make the invisible visible, to discuss our relationship to our personal and physical environments and explore sharing information about interconnectedness of our bodies, our earth.

Images

The following images can be found pinned in Google Earth - images documenting the journeys and activities by the participants in the project who, with artifacts from the land, went to a location to muse on their stories of scars.

Tony

Isabella

Jenny

Eva