Topographies of the Self

Part 2 of 3. Charcoal on paper, 30”x44”, 2022.

For my final Intermediate Drawing project, my class was tasked with creating our own prompts; the course was focused on developing skills to keep the lifeblood of a constant (or at least regular) visual arts practice flowing. For my prompt, I wanted to circle around the idea of treating a self portrait as an epistemological map, and vice versa, a map as an epistemological portrait of the self: A triptych of portrait-maps, cartographies of the self. I wanted to draw on, and in conversation with, the works of Roni Horn, Luchita Hurtado, and Dorothy Hood. Roni Horn has a fascinating extended collage process that I took inspiration from conceptually, if not in practice. Her collaged works end up becoming personal linguistic maps of her creation process. Dorothy Hood, a fellow Texan artist, created colossal graphic abstractions, bearing the weight of Texan landscapes, strewn with hunks of granite. I scaled up my paper size in an attempt to emulate the effect of her paintings/collages. Luchita Hurtado’s work (especially her landscape bodies and earth-word-maps) gave me the framework to examine maps and portraits as symbiotic (multibodied) documents of knowing. An article I read on her stated that “her body of work cohered through an examination of self-affirmation” — I wanted my portraits (maps of the self and of the world) to be similar tools of self-affirmation, or at least steps in the direction of self-determination.