Adventures on a Raft / Digressions Series
2010

The idea for this collaboration was to make an etching portfolio and installation project. The poems are from Molly Bendall’s “Adventures on a Raft” in Under the Quick (Parlour Press, 2009) and the images are modified versions of aerial photography taken in the Los Angeles area.
The maps that I used were derived from high altitude photographs taken at 20 year intervals. I use these types of images for my work in public art but, in particular, the images I have used for the project with Molly were sent to me by mistake. Somewhere along the line, the wrong coordinates were sent out so I got these images from the San Fernando Valley on a site along the 210 freeway. To further complicate this mistake and make it of interest to me, was that the actual road was one on which I drove for over five years. Often driving along that exact strip of freeway between the developed, residential areas and uninhabited, natural reserve areas, I would daydream about the extreme diversity of nature and urban build-out in LA.
Along with Molly's poems from Adventures on a Raft, the images form a meditation on sites and the perspective that one might have while floating alongside them. For me, this is an meaningful juxtaposition in relationship to Molly's poetry, to the memories that these elicit for me and then how the images reference abstract art forms.

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