When prompted to make a set of three images mapping the sensory experience of a location, I made quilted maps of my apartment from the perspective of my cat. She is elderly and deaf so I focused on mapping the area in relation to tactile sensation, smell, and limited eyesight. I also took into account what she would find important enough to be mapped. For my top-down map, I tried to imagine what functional information would be valuable to her, so I marked places of safety and danger. For the elevation map I used color saturation to show where her focus is concentrated, since the space we live in is tall and she can only really utilize the foot or 2 closest to the floor. For the perspective view, I took the shapes of the furniture from her point of view and tried to re-imagine them as a larger, mysterious environment that she might interpret based on the basic shapes and values she can see. Overall, I wanted to invoke a feeling of an epic fantasy map that would feel out of place with my experience of a studio apartment but might be closer to the experience of my tiny, ancient roommate.

These works were also inspired by the work of Valerie Goodwin, and architect, quilter, and multimedia artist whose webinar on map quilts I recently had the pleasure of attending.