DIVISION
In his book Of Species And Spaces, French writer Georges Perec made idiosyncratic observations about the division and classification of spaces in Paris. Perec observed that authorities, when mapping out the arondissements, haddecided that everything found within a certain area “should be coloured violet, while everything outside this area should be in a different colour”...“One bit of space wanted its colour and other bit its.“
So I began to consider the boundaries we live within today and how they might bevisually represented. There are the obvious physical boundaries like mountains, rivers and coastlines. But we also live our lives within myriad artificial boundaries - metropolitan suburbs, political and administrative jurisdictions, states & counties, nations, and statistical boundaries like economic and population variations, social and linguistic boundaries. And when plotted on a map, each area is duly assigned its colour, thus differentiating it from the contiguous areas.
So, I began to explore what the landscape and objects would look like through the prism of George Perec's observation What would a photograph of an area divided by its state or country boundary colours look like? What would a street split in two by its council or suburb boundaries look like? What would an area coloured according to a sociological statistic look like? And so on. The soil is the same, the trees are the same and the buildings essentially the same. And yet it has been determined that they are coloured differently.
