Fracturing & fluidity, isolation & (dis)integration: mapping ecological islands & edges in painting & music

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author’s watercolor maps capturing the inherently spatial, heterogeneous experiences of ecological islands and edges, and musical map evoking a multifaceted journey through an ‘archipelago’ of island ecosystems, aim to convey the increasing fragility and ‘preciousness’ of these slivers of the natural world. But simultaneously, the maps unintentionally begin to muddle this simplistic conception of ecological isolation and stability. The paintings’ fractured compositions and external frames appear to freeze and distance islands in space and time, but as the fragments multiply they also immerse the viewer in the geography and suggest ecological dynamism. The musical map has a similarly multifaceted structure, but it is mainly qualities of fluidity and cohesion, along with sound’s fundamentally non-descriptive, temporal nature, that objectify the island in some ways and in others produce an immersive, energizing effect. In future cartographic work, the author expects to more consciously engage rather than to resolve this tension between isolation and integration. But as a viewer/listener impression that is ultimately itself the ‘object’ of the maps, the islands’ imagined state of timelessness and preciousness is in fact a manifestation of their inseparability from humanity and the wider world – and therefore an image with reality and value of its own.