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Disturbance
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2010) Berg, Shannon Cherie; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Nelleke Beltjens
I am interested in the interaction of the cultural and natural landscape and how we perceive it, due to my experiences working for the Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. I use basic techniques of cartography and other processes used to study the earth to explore one small irrelevant place - a small crack in my concrete driveway. I use the crack in my driveway as a case study or metaphor for larger places of the earth. Through materials such as mylar, colored pencil and ink, I create visual abstractions of the crack in my driveway. Unlike a true map, I do not reference the scale of the works allowing them to resemble large or small places of the earth. The scale on a map indicates the relationship between a certain distance on the map and the actual distance on the ground. When in the gallery the viewer sees large-scale topographical drawings and diagrams resembling rivers, canyons, mountain peaks, valleys, fault lines etc. Other works are abstractions of colored-shapes that create patterns, a concrete cube - the volume of the crack, perspective drawings and diagrams. But like a map, the viewer is only able to process the information through the translations I have made of the space.