I have a series of drawings I did a few years back that I've been waiting to do something with, they felt very static on the pieces of vellum I drew them on. I was lucky enough to have Bill from Radical Cartography do some individual scans of the drawings and so I've finally decided to make them into a short video. Here is the background on the project:
This video was created from a series of drawings inspired by a teacher's edition atlas from the mid-1990's. Each country in the atlas had a graphic with it’s shape superimposed to scale on an outline of the US. I recreated the entire series from A-Z using ink on vellum. I was intrigued by the slow, methodical process of precisely drawing each shape of every country and redrawing the outline of the US over and over and over. I created visual conversations based on line, shape and scale that depoliticized these shapes. Because the source I was using was at least 15 years old, some of the countries do not even exist today or their borders have changed. I like to think that maps are similar to photographs in that they represent something at a given moment that will inevitably change or become out of date.
Link to the video on vimeo.
