Kilbane

​Simon is a landscape architect with a long-standing fascination with wetlands and waterways and their sights, sounds, smells, and – especially – their biota. Often obscured, lost, or otherwise not visible, Simon explores his personal relationship with these waters through a series of cartographic explorations that collage maps and memories.

The diviner’s dérive

 The diviner’s dérive offers a very personal cartographic exploration of my relationship with water and wetlands, over time and place. This collage compresses geographical fragments, text, photographic images and a variety of colours, shapes and textures as a map of lived spatial experience. Close inspection will reveal a myriad of different componentry that illustrate connections between self and water in a variety of forms including the ocean, harbours, rivers, lakes and swamps as well as depictions of several key water-dependent flora and fauna.
A fragment showing detail
The whole
Layers  of information 
hydrology​
imagery​
mapping​
symbols and notations​
narrative/lines​
dérive​
Shafts of colour indicate the dérive itself – a continuous polygon that drifts in and out of view of differing width and orientation, suggesting further cartographic meaning, hierarchy and narrative, all the while underlaid by an aqueous narrative of rivers, lakes, wetlands and further imagery drawn from this watery territory.
Cosgrove (1999) suggests that mapping reveals desire and while not attempting to be didactic, the narrative of water that underlies this work hints at its criticality and importance to my life: like a water diviner I am drawn to and have an affinity to inhabit that space between dry land and the water, the interstitial and ever-changing, dynamic of water and specifically, of wetlands. This is a work that draws upon previous notable cartographic explorers, including the early psycho-geographic works of Guy Débord and the Situationists (Débord, 1957), the inspirational and quasi-scientific recordings of John Wolseley (Grishin & Wolseley, 1998) and above all his inspirational practice of dwelling in place, and lastly Bunschoten and Chora (1998) whose attempts to coalesce complex layers of information and ideas as texture to mapping are one I reflect upon often. Each of these offer an array of speculations about the role of the map and the translation of information from the real three (and four) dimensional world to the two dimensional canvas or page. Compression of space, time and place is only possible through the creation of maps such as these. And while deeply personal (most of what is on the page holds depth of meaning and is almost impossible to convey) it hints at the relationship that all of us have to place and to the waters that lie, often hidden, but often visible just beneath our noses.
A fragment showing detail

References

Bunschoten, R., & Chora. (1998). Metaspaces. London: Black Dog.
Cosgrove, D. E. (1999). Mappings. London: Reaktion Books.
Débord, G. E. (1957). Guide psychogéographique de Paris: discours sur les passions de l'amour: pentes psychogéographiques de la dérive et localisation d'unités d'ambiance, 1957. Denmark: Permand & Rosengreen.
Grishin, S., & Wolseley, J. (1998). John Wolseley: landmarks. North Ryde, N.S.W.: Craftsman House.