The Map of Anywhen, Anywhere, Ever.
When the map is also the territory.
The Map of Anywhen is so new it’s hard for me to say what it will be. At the same time the Map of Anywhen is so old, that I’ve been navigating by it my whole life.
The Map of Anywhen finally got a name about two years ago when I started the first of what has become an ongoing series of maps in my drawing practice. At that time it was a way of mapping memory. It was also the first time in my three decades+ of creative practice that I’d brought writing and visual art together in one piece.
This is actually quite surprising, as I’ve always done both. I suspect a lot of what might emerge from this edition, this iteration of the Map of Anywhen on Substack will be about doing both together. Because I seem to be more inclined to the multidisciplinary than ever before and increasingly attracted to the essay as a site for experimentation across media. A new Map of Anywhen is slowly being drawn in my head - although when I say drawn, I might mean written, or stitched, or mapped, or textualised. Here seems as good a place as there (wherever those two may be) for starting to explore this hybrid cartography.
So there will be things, and if it’s unclear to you (and to me) whether they’re drawing or writing, story or map, embroidery or document, then I’ll probably be in the right territory. My hope is to explore multi disciplinary experiential processes of thinking through drawing, perceiving through writing, researching through making. How might these approaches influence the conclusions I come to? I don’t know, but even if the final form resembles a more conventional essay, I hope to document some of the hybridities that shaped it.
And also I just want a home for my writing, because it’s been a long time. I stopped for so many years. There’s a lot I could say about that. That writing hadn’t felt a necessary or essential thing; that I’d lost the love of words for their own sake, the roll and song and gravitational pull of them; that for five years I’ve been too ill to write. But I’m writing again - and I want a place to put the words. When you put things down in space you begin to understand the relationship between them. This is why we map. Perhaps every line I ever wrote was actually a map of somewhere I needed to go. This Substack, then, is a map.
I hope you’ll finger-feel and read your way through it with me. There’s no paywall for the Map of Anywhen, so just hit the button below and subscribe. And I’ll publish something from time to time. And when I’m not here I’ll be over on Instagram (you can trace the path with me there too).
And if you’re intrigued to see how all this shapes up and know someone who would be too, please do share and restack.
Love the sound of this, looking forward to more posts! Combining writing with visual art has become a thematic interest for me too this year.