Mapping as a Philosophy

by Yas Crawford

Yas Crawford is an internationally awarded photographer who has exhibited in the UK and Europe. She is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and a Fellow of the Geological Society. Yas was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales where the landscape and biological makeup have subliminally influenced her work. With a degree in Geology and a master’s in Photography, she has worked in various business roles, an entrepreneur in life sciences, and is now working in what she calls ‘The Grey Space’ in-between disciplines.

Yas's work has been recognised over the last two years with several international awards including Winner of the Art of Neuroscience Award 2021 for Cognition IX and BIFA Silver Award for her personal project The Edge of Sentience, Winner of the Land Air 4.0 Quasi Quadro Award 2021 with Inception I. Yas held her first solo exhibition Cellular Flow, I've been thinking' in Barge, Turin 11 Dec 2021 to 25 Feb 2022, and has completed several international multidisciplinary collaborations.

As a young Geology student roaming the Sub- Alps close to Castellane and the Gorge du Verdon in the Haupt Provence region of France with a clipboard, compass, and Pentax Super A camera, was where it all started for me. Years later, the concept of mapping came quite naturally as a backbone or structure for new photographic work. The idea of mapping, its Babylonian roots and ideas created in post-modern times with all its nuances has served me well, as a tool, to develop abstract thinking, contextualising events and building multidisciplinary collaborations to consolidate projects.

Mapping to many of us conjures up visions of street maps, ordinance survey maps, tube maps and geographical maps. The use of google maps and aerial satellite imagery allowing us to travel virtually and these different forms helps us structure and understand the world. The development of maps, however, from historical to post-modern has a somewhat unchartered history. Its accuracy, usefulness, scientific foundations and its mathematical constructs have been constantly in question. Although key to understanding the world by monitoring geographical, social, political and natural features, after World War II, maps started to lose their historical influence, remaining stuck in premodern times.

We eventually see the emergence of Cartographers and their work dedicated to improving accuracy, both technical and scientific in their approach to clarify understanding, through mathematical constructs, distance, and direction. The post Enlightenment Period giving raise to topographic maps in 3D revealing depth and height, maps that measure everything from the movement of sea currents to wind directions. Later the reintroduction of the emotional map, ensuring the map-work remains both a physical and mental practice.

As a photographic artist the concept of the mapmaking acts as a skeletal backbone to support and developing ideas, a type of system for organising knowledge. It allows too for the development of abstraction and ambiguity within my projects as a type of emotional mapping, mainly through its inaccuracies and contradictions. The connectedness between series guiding the visual communication.

I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life-bios-graphically on a map

- Walther Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, 1978.

Just as Walther Benjamin points out, I find myself connecting my projects and then deconstructing them. Deconstructionist strategy, is a strategy that has been used in many disciplines including philosophy, literature, architecture and more recently geography. Whilst we might believe that mapping has a finite connectedness it has also been used over the centuries to deconstruct, in other words break the assumed links between reality and representation. An example of this deconstruction in my work, is the use of external and internal landscapes, the layering and later deconstruction creates new imagery with no deliberate ties to science or art, but something in between. Once a series of images is created, I deconstruct again by selecting successful and unsuccessful images, reflected in the numbering. The numbering is systematic as if a scientific process, the rejection of failed images deconstructs the sequence, breaking that link again between reality and representation. Deconstruction permits abstraction, develops abstract thinking and a focus on the ambiguous, The Grey Space between disciplines. In turn the audience remains in control of both their conscious and subconscious thoughts and ideas, protected from any stigma or label they might otherwise feel associated with.

1

Delano-Smith, C. (2001). The grip of the enlightenment: The separation of past and present. In Woodward, D., Delano-Smith, C. & Yee, C. (eds.) Plantejaments i objectuis d’una histo`ria universal de lacartografia/Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography, pp 283--297. Barcelona: Institut Cartogra` fic de Catalunya.

2

Foucault ,M. (1980). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Vintage Books, New York.

3

Knox, P.L. (1988) The Design Professions and the Built Environment, Croom Helm, London. Gregory, D. (1987) Postmodernism and the politics of social theory. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space, 5, 245–248.

Maps can be rhetorical in nature, they communicate intentions but not answers, they explore space and time, not just measurement and topography, they can record anything from emotions to political strategies. I deliberately develop ideas around what the eye cannot normally see, the landscape images created with a technological machine (camera) with a limited frame, then intertwined with a microscopic image from a much smaller eye. However, when viewing the microscopic image, the microscopic world expands to that of our external landscape, so combining the two becomes rhetorical and a little surreal. This

deconstruction method allows the creation and birth of something new, from something deconstructed.

As I develop the collection of Mapping Projects the idea of map-making images is an attempt to situate the images in a social as well as an environmental context, rather than create what is obviously or literally a scientifically constructed mapping form. This is developing over time, and I have an idea of the endpoint but as our environment and life experiences change, so the end could change too.

Mapping I.

At its most tangible, a body can be a seemingly well-defined organ like a liver. Or it can be a spatially challenging network of solid and liquid like the vascular system. Or it can be an invisible assembly, truly as an abstract a thing as "traffic" or "democracy", like the immune system, with its lymphocytes and T4 messengers, a miniaturized cryptography machine for encoding and decoding data about invading organisms

- Chaos by James Gleik, P280

Mapping I focuses on mapping aspects of human functions. Imagining the human body as a map, its bodily functions are revealed in different projects: Blood Flow, Cellular Flow, Bio-Mapping for example. It is possible to consider individual images as a single map. Cognition I, is a form of rhetorical map. It outlines the primary or natural subject (the landscape), it explains the secondary subject (the illustrated neural network of the brain) and it finally reveals an intrinsic and subliminal feeling of how our internal and external worlds collide, just as art and cartography collide in map-making. As we travel through the different series there is a sense of the landscape or space securing the science, allowing us a glimpse into the unknown.

©Yas Crawford 2019. Cognition I. Series: The 8 th Sense.

©Yas Crawford 2021. Oxidative Stress IAiii. Series: Oxidative Stress

Mapping II.

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the materials that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

- Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road.

Mapping II focus moves to an evolutionary concept, from the biological to the geological. It’s collection of a series of images moves with time from In the Beginning, imaginary and metaphorical creations of what it might have been like when earth was first created to one of disorder and chaos. Chaos theories we understand to be circular, one aspect having a direct impact on the other. The series Space, Light and Order develops metaphorical ideas around the geometrical and organised aspects of a map. The series Nature, Energy, Technology, use technology as cameraless techniques, dislocating the topography (created to set boundaries) around us helping us to identify with our surroundings and recognise environmental changes.

©Yas Crawford 2022. Inception IIId. Series: Nature Energy Technology

©Yas Crawford 2021. Inception Ia. Series: Nature Energy Technology

Mapping III.

For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything-almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and trivial memories. A little later he realised he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now his perception and memory were infallible.

- Jorge Lui Borges, Funes the Memorius, Ficciones_1962

Mapping III maps and connects individual stories more documentary in nature but retaining a fine art form. As we move through biological and geological changes we have had to adapt as human beings. Our environment past, present, and future dictating our longevity. The boundaries we know to be comfortable no longer clearly defined. The Lombardy Series is a direct reflection of a change we have all had to adapt to recently. Coronavirus, a virus with no respect for boundaries dislocates the Italian landscape and lives. The Edge of Sentience, not completed yet, deals with social anxiety and mental illness that becomes exacerbated when we are forced to accommodate changes. The Universe and Chinese Herbs is an attempt to find a way to express the effort that is made for our own self-healing. The effort of creating the series of images of individual Chinese herbs, were in themselves difficult to dissolve in solution, some more granular than others. The solutions were then photographed through glass vessels using 35mm film, leaning on older processes and ancient Chinese therapies reflecting the human effort.

©Yas Crawford 2021. Floral V. Series: The Edge of Sentience

©Yas Crawford 2021. Frozen II. Series: The Edge of Sentience

The parallels with photography may not be obvious, at first, but the map is an artifact, an object, an image and used as a vehicle of communication fashioned by time and society. Similarly, my work is researched not only through direct camera use but also by developing illustrations (Cognition IX) and using cameraless techniques (Inception Ia). Printing first and then re-creating the image has sudden and apparent similarities with the printed map, its many versions, reproductions, the medium itself, nature of the paper, inks used, colours, watermarks, and its legitimacy. The deconstruction of images by cutting or marking the image, the print or negative reflects similarities with the processes found in mapmaking, the damage to a wood block or copper plate in printing creating similar effects. These differences and similarities develop ideas about

what is subjective in my visual world and helps set those ideas in a social context.

As we bring disciplines together and away from the secularisation of specialised subjects in early academic settings, cartography and art is one way of understanding how over time disciplines can be brought together. Subjects intermingling in a way that changes our understanding of the word ‘discipline’ and of the world today.

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