Life Maps

Abstract Life Maps are gentle, spacious and a bit mysterious. Each one contains a complex personal history, narratives of life.

Completed during the pandemic summer of 2020, Life Maps explores how a lifetime might be expressed as a series of metaphorical maps.

The idea for the series began one day when I was thinking about someone close whom we‘d recently lost. She’d been an avid forager, exploring semi-wilderness on paths of her own devising, looking for berries, mushrooms, edible flowers. I was imagining all of her trails, superimposed year over year: a life map of expeditions.

How many such maps might there be, for anyone’s life? A map of becoming: childhood, youth, parenthood. Perhaps one to trace the artifacts of creativity, found after the children leave. Others could come from family stories, that rich community of collective remembering. Add a companion map for all the ways a life is forgotten. One showing paths untravelled. What would you map?