Ongoing Work with Maps 2008 ->

Imaginary Maps is a group of works made by Daudy over the years bringing together her research interests, her own experience of unreliable map-reading, shifting time and space, and work with memory and psycho-geography. Psycho-geographical writing responds to the distinctiveness of places, things and images, and traverses the boundaries between fiction, history, traveller’s tales, anecdote, and memoir. It is a genre which was designed in the first instance by writers including WG Sebald, to reveal the hidden context of our urban existence (such as in Guy Debord’s work in the 1950s in Paris), re-tasked to do the same for the broader environment.

`Memory mapping’ draws on the practice and theory of psycho-geography, inspired by Mass Observation, Surrealism and the situationists, notably Debord. Memory mapping also, however, draws on folklore traditions. Daudy has studied Marina Warner’s extensive work on folk and fairy tales for her work, including The Secret Commonwealth: Of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (2006b), where Warner traces the roots of memory mapping in the seventeenth-century British essay tradition associated with Robert Kirk and others.

Daudy’s idea maps are premised on the idea that the physical environment makes itself felt in the behaviours of its people. Both imagination and memory are shaped by the material world, including the material media that have historically given a body to the mind’s labours: wax tablet, print, screen etc. Warner has argued, for this reason, that the materiality or tactility of the book shapes our imagination differently than immaterial digital media do (2006a, 2009). It is theoretical insights such as these that have informed the content and design of Daudy’s very physical, handmade felt and paper map archive.