Hemisphere Tracings (Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere), 2001

Hemisphere Tracings (Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere) was made by wrapping a sheet of tracing paper around each hemisphere of a contemporary terrestrial globe and tracing only the placenames of the world's largest cities, omitting all the other marks which may have mapped oceans, mountains, borders and other geographical features. On these stripped-back maps, the placenames stand in for landmass, each continent created from a collection of words. 

This work is from a series of drawings where the artist explores the mathematical problems of translating a three-dimensional entity such as the globe into a two-dimensional form and the distortion and biases this creates.