Krista Dragomer

Created by pouring paper pulp onto canvas, working with found materials and environmentally responsive dyes, Unmapping the World is a series of works that invite a navigation of space and place that situate provisional, intimate, and relational forms of knowing against the fixed cartographies of the dominant world-map, opening space for embodied, contingent ways of orienting ourselves beyond the drawn line.

1. underground cloud zone: paper pulp made from the abaca plant native to the Philippines, and cotton linter tinted with litmus, marks from walnuts and seeds dropped by the warblers, wrens, chickadees, cardinals and robins, ash, red clay and rainwater. Record high summer temperatures.

2. underground breathing zone: mulberry paper rubbings of beetle galleries on a decaying stump on Woodhull and Hamilton, paper pulp left on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment when the sky was thick with smoke, ash, the red clay I brought back and sandy soil from a nearby construction site, plaster, walnut dye, sumi ink, graphite.

3. fragile zone: mulberry paper rubbings of unidentified insect markings, snow still blowing in off Lake Erie, grapevine charcoal, graphite, a copper wire from an old rotary phone, too delicate to fasten the layers.

4. fissure zone: a thin layer of abaca fixed to canvas tinted with the last of the walnut dye and sediment from the cooking process, plaster and Maryland red clay, cotton pulp and the last of the summer fires.

5. buckling from above or below zone: mulberry paper rubbings of beetle galleries on a decaying stump on Woodhull and Hamilton, paper pulp mixed with atmospheric debris, ash, and red clay, walnut dye from the fruits collected along the Severn, sumi ink, graphite.

6. falling objects zone: paper pulp tinted with litmus, a dye made from several species of lichen, used as a pH indicator, aphid honeydew, snail mucus, mosquitos, paper made with red clay, ash, acid fabric dye, colored pencil and graphite marks, gradually accumulated over three seasons.