Letter Ten; Visual Maps. The emotional landscape of Covid19. Part One.
Visual mapping is a form of drawing that I use to aesthetically document moments. In these drawings and sculptures, I use visual language to document emotions felt at key moments at home during the Covid19 2020 Pandemic Quarantine. It works much like a journal, but instead of words, the visual language of line, shape, color, space, etc are used to convey the emotions and experiences. The rectangle is the boundaries of my house footprint. The placement of diagrams reflects the physical placement of the body during a specific moment.
There is a little history here to give this context. I’ve been working with my students in our class, "The Guerrilla Art Collective" at Curie HS on Chicago's SW side. Together with my colleague, Andres Hernandez, we worked with students to visually map our experiences during the Covid19 Pandemic. We actually started mapping our community before Covid19, but then we were concerned with issues of safety and freedom within the context of an unequal and disparate political/economic space.
Now we are faced with a new world, a new way of living. We decided to use our mapping technique to capture our experiences facing this novel virus. What is like to be in our homes, to venture out into the world? What are our issues of safety, danger, freedom, and restriction now?
Intended to be an artistic way to capture data difficult to quantify, this process became a way of journaling for me in my own practice. I’ve continued to do the drawings as a way to see within and express the ineffable.
Artist: Valerie Xanos. StudioXanoi.com
Social: @Nightbird888
