Map of Lost Places - project & process

 In primary school my favourite thing was Project Books. These were an oblong-shaped book - not quite A3 but something close to it - long, is what remember, long enough to really stretch out your titles in bubble writing or some approximation of a Medieval font. We picked a subject we were interested in (Dogs, Dinosaurs), and drew pictures and wrote facts snatched from the brown-and-cream Encyclopedia Brittanica. Clearly I never lost the love of collating and presenting information. Later I would get into Letraset transfers ... I had these analog adventures in mind when thinking of the map for the Map of Lost Places. Lisa and I wanted it to be easy to read, but we were also dealing with quite a bit of text. There were the names of places AND the names of streets. Then there are all those lovely half-streets and alleys to play with (and potentially complicate things). Melbourne is famously built on a grid - my thinking was that as long we had a couple of the more significant street names then the reader could figure out the rest. Below are a few experiments and what we finally arrived at. We got the zine copies on Friday, and it is a sweet little back-pocket-sized portal into other people's memory. Zines will be available after the walk (September 13) at Sticky and other TBC outlets.

Supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants