“One of my favorite things about using maps to create art is that they retain the inherent history of the person who owned them before me. It is a history I am rarely privy to, yet I feel becomes part of the work. I often imagine maps and atlases rolling off the printing press - household names like Hammond, AAA, Rand McNally, (or Ordnance Survey from the UK, where I grew up). Somehow one of the tens of thousands of copies of a particular edition, maybe decades (once or twice even a century) after it was printed, finds its way to me. The paper is worn at the folds, yellowed at the edges, cities are circled, routes are highlighted. Coffee spills, phone numbers, and directional notes all speak to its earlier life as a functional object in someone else’s hands. Through these maps I experience histories small and large. I vicariously travel other peoples’ vacations, witness the downfall of empires, borders moving, and experience the name change of countries.

I like to say that a beautiful map makes my heart race and my hand reach for my X-acto knife. Through the cutting, tearing, the layering, pasting, the rolling and folding of that one atlas or single fold out map, I too become part of its history.”