Yorkshire Sculpture Park 

Mapping My Journey 

We went to YSP to create a map that documented the journey we took in our groups of four around the park. We started off by using a coin to decide the direction of our walk, every 5 minutes of waling we flipped a coin to decide whether we'd go left or right.
My group did this for the whole trip, so that we would create a detailed a full list of instructions which we could effectively work off from later in the week.

I wanted to looking outside of the typical conventions of a map, so decided to record the intensity of the wind  and the scenery around pivotable  points in the journey. This led me to create a map where I followed  the list I had made from the the coin flipping, but relied more heavily on text and line thickness.

Perhaps I could have focused more on the sounds around me as we were walking round the park. This would have added a totally different dimension to my work, as i have solely been focussing on visual queues to build my body of work.

Experimenting

We carried on as a group with the line drawings we had worked on with the coin flipping,  but merged the sculptural sketches with them to make a piece which was much more engaging and could be developed into something more refined and displayable.

Final Piece

This led us as to a piece which would focus on the time spent at each location, which we interpreted in the volume of the dots. This was partly inspired by Yayoi Kusama and her work with dots and net paintings. The shape of this piece resembles a standard map but the shape of the dots used to map out  varies, creating a piece which offers a lot of information while not being too convoluted. We placed our map on the wall because the grey colour of the dots set a neutral we were going for and contrasted well with the white wall and portrayed the map in a position which was most eligible.

Class Crit

The class crit allowed us to gain an outside perspective on the final result of our research and experimentation. Most of the feedback came with the notion that it was a well finished clean precise map but it could have been experimented with further as it is pretty obviously a map. It could have been adapted by adding a 3d element to the map, maybe around the sculptures/significant points to present a theme for that area.  Another comment which came up a lot was the representation of time in the piece i.e. 'how many minutes per dot?' which wasn't the aim of this map, there wasn't meant to be a direct correlation between exact time spent walking and the distance of the dots, it was built more from memory and from objects we took notice of, which we then built a time frame around. This was because we wanted to create a piece which was time based but totally based on our own experiences and view points from around the park, so that it would be unique to our experience. This would in turn allow others reading the map to make they're own mind up on what were the focal points following this trail around the park.