RUTH WATSON
b. 1962, New ZealandFor over twenty years Ruth Watson has used maps as a basis for making art. Unlike many artists using map imagery, she does not use the map or globe as a ‘given’ or ‘found object’. Rather she investigates its structure, the map projection itself.
Watson is looking for projections that can challenge the way we usually represent the world and transform their meanings further via the use of materials. These range from photographs of the surface of a tongue (a lingua geographica) to chocolate wrapping paper or pink plastic shopping bags. Her maps have been stretched and distorted, moulded into heart shapes, and printed onto silken dresses. Globes have been made from animal tissue or beautifully executed in hand blown glass. For example Lost Worlds, a new series of drawings, uses uncommon map projections as their basis. Rendered on heavy paper then erased, the image of something that once existed no longer does, the only remnants are embedded in the paper.
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