Janice Caswell

I was researching how one might map memories because I'm quite interested in how you could map something so intangible and ephemeral. Janice Caswell has an interesting methods of mapping memories.

She says her work arises out of a desire to capture experience and an impulse to locate, arrange and secure the past. Her work also embraces the mind’s faulty processes in trying to accomplish this. She creates her mental maps in the form of large scale wall drawings and works on paper. She connects a system of color coded circular points with drawn lines or threads to define a space and re-create a past experience using an organizational map constructed from her own memories. She admits that there is no way for her to accurately chart these memories, but she is more interested in the process of how the mind organizes information and how that can play out visually. When you look at her work you get a sense of how memories can be so intertwined, that making them fixed points on a timeline could be impossible to sort out.