While river, road, coast, or border are easily translatable to a flat, singular line, the hillsign has been a complex problem for even the cleverest of cartographers. The three-dimensionality of the undulating earth does not lend itself to the quasi-omniscient and privileged top down viewing angle preferred by western mapmakers and map-readers. Throughout history the map’s hillsign has hovered between a type of pictorial representation and the intellectualizing symbolism of concentric contours. It is in this space between landscape icon and landscape symbol that my work resides.

By reducing stand-ins of the external world to their most basic elements I am able to expand outward to the visually relational similarities that can exist between mountain and cloud, shrub and hill, and sky and lake. In this reduction of information I am able to make visual comparison of divergent landscape identities that enable me to point to a larger and more complex set of relationships. Through a mix of languages and signifiers I am creating a specified depiction of no-place, of every-place, where the culminating image is one that ties together memory, fantasy, visual experience, and an intellectual understanding of external space.