Susan Campbell

Site Lines: An exploration of physical mapping practices

My practice is driven by the way “the Plan” is used as a stand-in for place, and by our tendency to identify with a plan at the cost of our connection with place - with its physicality, its historic context, its role within the social fabric. I reflect on my own complicity as a graphic designer in creating the kind of clean, seamless visions that are fine-tuned to appeal to a target demographic. I discuss how the designers’ extensive array of media is so successful at “holding the focus steady” (Latour 1986: 5) on the projected world, that it masks the underlying rules that enable and perpetuate that projection. The artworks engage with the theme of spatial hyper-rationalization, and speak to the inescapability of Cartesian time-space. My site-line interventions engender a brief sense of freedom and agency into an otherwise hyper-rationalized environment, and suggest a fluidity between interior/exterior space and private/public space.

 2012