Mapping Places Final
Before going into the final presentation, I would like to pay my respect and acknowledge the Traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal people, the Gweagal people & the Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation, in which I studied, researched, and mapped. It is upon their ancestral land that I share knowledge in this module, such that I would like to pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever in the Aboriginal custodianship of Country.
The overall theme explored in these final mapping documentation is wet to dry. The base layer represents the wetness to dryness of the creek to the surrounding land. Fountain Pen ink was used to illustrate the invisible boundary between the land and the water through the little shores creates by the bleeding technique I used. With the help of water, the looseness of the materiality allowed me to freely represent the fluctuating surface area of the waterways. The different hatches represent the different vegetation layers: wet, dry, and wetland. The vegetation layer was chosen to convey the relationship between the waterways and how it affects the vegetation. The moisture of the vegetation is not just dependent to where the waterways are located, as they are a few wet vegetation and wetland locations that are not close to waterways. The highways are depicted by the dotted lines, and covey the relationship with the vegetation through the coexistence between the natural and synthetic order.
I was able to approach this drawing with further detail due to the intimate scale. This scale focuses on a section of Mill Stream that backs onto a golf club. The development of the theme was explored in greater detail as the differentiation between the vegetation and the creek body was more apparent. The ink was able to blend into the vegetation while also defining the creek bed with the inspiration of my precedent, Irene Kopelman, where she utilised watercolour to layer her materiality, which inspired to develop my bleeding technique, where I not only let it bleed inwards, but I let it slightly bleed outwards to illustrate the moisture of the soil surrounding the stream and to convey the relationship the stream has with the surrounding vegetation.
After visiting the site I was mapping, my concept and theme of my chosen layers were developed even further. I discovered how the vegetation appears to hide or ''consume'' the some parts and surroundings of the stream, juxtaposing the surrounding empty grass fields of the golf course. This contrasted my main theme as it explores how the creek affects the vegetation that I was observing and studying. After this informative experience, I was able to critic and reflect on my previous maps, considering the fluidity of the blending boundaries that divides the wetness of the stream to the dryness of the land. The use of a blue duotone filter with the opacity slightly turned down on the photographs is purposefully symbolic as it emphasises the connection between the vegetation and the stream, where the vegetation is dependent on the stream itself.
The sensory poem was inspired by my thoughts and feelings as I visited the stream. The use of some words juxtaposing each other is to depict the relationship that the natural and synthetic formalities have an impact on each other compared to the parts of the stream that are barely untouched by artificial structures. The use of how it's shaped like a circle on the outside conveys a deeper meaning to the stream through my definition of mapping, where by observing something on the map seems simple, but when you visit it personally, you are able to see things differently and gain a different experience from what you would see only on the map.
