Application summary

Necessary Clarity of the Overflow: A Cartography of the Present is a project that merges the ancient cartographic drive with contemporary ideas of placeness, to create a series of lyrical essays that note the vertical richness of each discrete space, layered as they are with the tulle of histories, stories, and memories. Maps are the same as every human creation—burdened with our predispositions, customs, and desires. From indigenous Australian songlines and ancient Chinese mythology, the navigational tools and techniques that human beings have developed form an immense and variegated body of knowledge, one that draws a portrait not only of how the landscape has changed, but how the human body has long existed as a spatial orientation. I’m interested in how our current notions of place, led almost universally by technological guidance and pre-ordained pathways, disrupt humanity’s natural creative instinct for exploration, curiosity, and engagement with their environment—how literature can be utilised to confront this drive towards flatness and the extinction of intimate detail. As concerns of earthly degradation and deterioration increase in the Anthropocene, our detachment from environment creates a mindset that focuses largely on defense—shielding ourselves in shelters and manmade oases against the climate, sketched with morbid terms in perceivable threats. I would like to create works that instead imagine a more intimate and delicate movement through our world—one that values knowledge instead of alienation. I am working from the essential idea that our carelessness can be alleviated by an awareness of places as immense archives of beauty, conquering, surrender, and speech.