Land of Scars
Fascinated by the stories behind scars I asked friends and family to send me a picture of a scar and share with me the story behind it. I received different stories from scars created from cuts and falls to scars from surgeries, births, terrorist attacks and sexual assaults.
Gathering the stories of the scars and starting to look at the shapes, I was reminded of islands - private places that hold stories that can be revealed by exploration. This led me to research the body as geography seeing works such as Druksland as well as ancient and imaginary maps and maps as tools of storytelling.
From there I returned to the scars I gathered and started placing them on a map. The first version of placement was based on the person's first name and the location of the scar on the body. However, I was convinced there was a better way. I then turned to common graphs- a java tool used to create network maps and entered the name of people and a few keywords from each story to create a map.
While I was working on the map I was also working on creating patterns out of the scars beautifying them in a way. While searching for a way to represent the stories of each scar, I turned back to the patterns and created letter caps out of them.
