Topo-Graphica: on drawing, mapping, and subjectivity

This book unfolds as an accordion: text on one side, image on the other. Bronwen Payerle draws details of herself across the length of paper to yield an image of the land. Text and image work to synthesize the constructivist/essentialist debate and together they carve an ethics of ourselves-in-the-world. Uncategorisable as reading experience, the accordion collapses one genre into the next: poetry, fact, narrative and philosophy, until negative space retains the unspoken. Geography seeps through the paper, delineating physical and conceptual terrain, to witness a becoming.

Bronwen Payerle’s is a Vancouver based artist and writer whose art practice subverts the conventions of figure drawing and cartography by re-appropriating these techniques and offering a feminist re-working of traditionally male-dominated practices.

TOPO-GRAPHICA is also available in a non-limited edition perfect bound paper back. This is a 75 page, 9” X 6” book which includes both the text and images taken from the original drawings.