Landscape Archives and Island Repositories
My love and admiration for landscapes began throughout the completion of my Masters Degree in Architecture. Living in Ireland, travelling through Ireland and appreciating our world around us, can be highlighted in a series of ways that we are culturally exposed to as our interests in nature evolve. Such as poetry, verse and song, art and of course through Cartography.
One of my main inspirations is the cartographer, Tim Robinson. Cartographer, artist, illustrator and poet, Robinson moved to the Arran Isles to document the landscape through conversation with those that he met, drawing details that he discovered and there fore translating these into maps, as if someone had discovered the landscapes for the first time. The art of Cartography and the appreciation of landscapes is naturally lessening, which is where I believe the next generation of architects and artists can revitalise and regenerate these topographies into new methods of drawing and adaptation into art.
My Thesis looked into exactly this, titled Rathlin Island; A Landscape Inventory - How do we Archive the Landscapes? Rathlin Island is located just six miles off the North Coast of Ireland, amidst the Sea of Moyle, in close proximity to the Scottish Isles. Looking at the vast, exposed Irish landscape that is Rathlin Island, allowed me to document the island in a way that had not been done before. I created drawings of the paths to the Island's lesser known locations, I mapped the landscape through embroidery and tapestries, relative to the textures that I believed I saw in the aerial imagery that is now so readily accessible to my generation. I created new maps of the landscape, drawn to massive scales, thanks to digital means, where I could walk people through the journey that I was slowly uncovering on the island of Rathlin.
This passion for cartography has allowed me to take new ventures, completing commission tapestries of the landscapes that people love, and drawings of home towns in a unique, bespoke style that is special to them. Bringing my practice to life in a way that encourages me to keep discovering new territories, and new cartographies is an exciting endeavor to me, that I am hoping to publicise through various platforms.
