Impermanence: Sian Robertson Artist Talk

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels. For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I embraced the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might happen when people also enter the space. I envisioned hundreds of cut maps hanging from the beams, perhaps randomly, perhaps in a specific layout. I have a sense of the installation being somewhat representative of the world, in particular the fragility of the planet and how we are failing to take care of it. But I also like the idea that it spreads through the community and parts of it live on wherever people put the pieces that they take. I see the whole as ephemeral and removing some of the individual elements does not diminish it. And maybe, during future iterations of the installation, more will be added, and it will continually evolve; perhaps becoming a permanent part of my art practice.