Janice Caswell's amazing collages and drawings are made with tiny pieces of paper and lines of ink representing mental maps and the narrative as she envisions them. Hole-punched paper circles chart steps along a path, while colors delineate sites where events occur - cities, neighborhoods, buildings or rooms. Simple ink lines trace the wanderings and form the narrative. The mind proccesses and remembers space unreliably and incompletely - rather than trying to force reality on the mental maps, the incongruities are accepted and depicted as memory serves.This is how Janice Caswell describes her pieces: "This work arises out of a desire to capture experience, an impulse to locate, arrange and secure the past. I use a pared-down, coded language through which points, lines and fields of color define spaces and retell narratives, making memories concrete. But memory is a flawed system. Gaps arise in the process of recollecting and the mind is constantly reconfiguring and recreating the past. My work embraces the mind's faulty processes. In drawing my maps, subjective decision making, human error and reevaluation come into play. The result is a representation that is simultaneously deliberate and vague. In attempting to create a system for representing experience, the pieces become dynamic records of memory itself in the act of recreating what would otherwise be lost."
Although both her works on paper and wall drawings are equally striking, the latter just makes better use of different planes and larger dimensions, which makes the result even more appealing.
