
I especially love her stick maps (because of my interest in Marshall Islands stick charts) and her map icons!
I had even entitled one of my own paintings Flow before discovering the work of Leila Daw!
From her artist statement:
I am fascinated by mapping, as a way of representing the convergence of place and movement, as a means of imposing human ideas over the contours of the natural world, as a system of filters through which we see the landscape.
We try to exert control over our environment by mapping, and think we're not lost if we can pinpoint our location on a map. But mapping is subjective: how do we know where we are, when what we're looking for determines what we see? Culture transforms not only the sites we inhabit, but the ways in which we see those sites. We change the land by the ways we occupy it, but the land in turn changes us, so we know longer know which way we're going, which is past and which future, or how to get from here to where we think we belong.