The Death of a Journey
An anchor marks a pause in movement, the end of a journey and the stillness before the start of another.
This anchor, one of the final additions to the Nomadic Art Gallery Truck and colourfully reminiscent of a wheel clamp binds the truck to a stationary point in space, holding it in stillness until the anchor is picked up and the next journey begins.
Auckland’s Volcanoes Roughly Centred (Little Version)
Silverpoint on Fabriano 780 x 1060 mm
Contour maps of each of Auckland’s volcanos have been centred and layered, their peaks and troughs existing all together at a single point.
A tidying and compiling of data, a rearrangement of my home’s volcanic geography, creating a new mapping of impossible space, like folding a map the information is layered and complex.
Mapping is a way of understanding, of making sense of something vast and intricate, a means of compiling information, making something larger than ourselves visible and accessible. In bringing these maps together they no longer make sense, the information compiled has been stacked and compressed, becoming thick and dense, all the data seen all at once.
A simply connected Riemannian manifold with negative Gaussian curvature. Parkin Drawing Prize 2019, NZ Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington
(2019). 8010.75 metres of Acrylic Knitting Yarn #622 (9/10ths the height of Mt. Everest) in 10,014,000 ± 0.7% single crochet stitches, 340 x 530 x 430mm 4 kg.
Since discovering hyperbolic space in the 1820s mathematicians sought a way to construct durable physical models of hyperbolic geometry, a feat many believed was impossible. In 1997 Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina realised a solution using techniques handed down to her, she simply crocheted one.
The uncomplicated pattern of an increasing number of stitches in each row creates a complex curl of parallel lines, a maximum surface area in a limited volume and creates an intersection, a meeting point between High Mathematics and Hand Crafts. Using blogs as a site for content and communication, crafters share patterns for hyperbolic geometry to make mathematically interesting adornments, and conversely mathematicians learn craft techniques as functional modeling methods.
There is a limit to the medium, as with many models of exponential growth it cannot sustain itself indefinitely, stitches expand and fibres fray, pulled taut beneath growing pressure, unravelling from within as it begins to disintegrate under its own mass.
It would take approx. 4000 metres of wool to complete the next row.
Contour maps show elevations which change slowly but inevitable over time due to erosions or the administrations of man, or can be altered swiftly by the explosive forces of shifting plates.
The weather too is a vast force mapped for accessibility and understanding, a constantly shifting mass of information and pressure made visible, moving in faster flux to geography but the two are inextricable linked, each able to change the other.
Mapping Eden, Graphite, silverpoint and ink pen on paper 705 x 1000 mm
On the Terrace (Yellow is a Tricky Thing), Acrylic on prepared Calico 405 x 505 mm
Single Location (Eden Terrace) seen through the grid of the city and the elevation of contour lines
Rose Meyer 