Apian Cartography – print (2012)

Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Apian Cartography – print (2012)

Apian Cartography Suite, screen print variations, 15”h x 19”, 30”h x 60”w, 9’h x 12’w

Apian Cartography Suite is a direct result of exploring the archives in Canberra where I found potential outlines and maps for this imagined city. I began to draw -re-draw- to trace various maps that had inspired me until the map drawing took on lines and curves that resembled but were also fiction. I screen printed my map sections onto mitsumata tissue and from these created a series of wallpaper like pieces. Each fragment was joined, repeated, tessellated or mirrored. The title Apian Cartography refers back to the beehive metaphor as I began to imagine a city plan as a lacey flight pattern of the bee circling back and forth over their territory, creating a unique and ever repeating utopian map.