Every Road I Know From Memory (Detail of Palatine, IL)
This project was an exploration of personal knowledge versus collective knowledge and to see how large the map in my head is. I am interested in the knowledge that we inherit from society: industrial made maps, dictionaries and other authoritative sources that supplament and usually supercede our own knowledge. I wanted to find out how much I knew and how much I depend on the system. I started drawing every road and body of water I could think of and all the places I could visualize navigating to. I left off all street names because I wanted it to remain personal and I was interested in the abstract marks and forms in themselves. As I was mapping out places, each route brought up memories of tangents and detours and it ended up taking me three months and a canvas 144"x96" to record it all. This detail is of an area about 6"x4". It has crossed my mind to do the same thing with the encyclopedia- start with the index and write entries for all the words I know, but I haven't started that project... yet.
