Contemporary Art thrives on fashionable catch-words as never before; in the previous century new Art Movements came about once in a decade or two, now they seem to proliferate annually; walking art, mindfulness art, socially engaged art, socially excluded art, healing art, underprivileged art, youth art, knitting art, drawing whilst dancing art, drawing with eyes closed art, making repetitive marks art, leaning art (most sculpture seems unable to stand on its own nowadays). Deep Mapping easily falls into this category.
Go around any Art School today and you could play student statement bingo with all of these terms. It shouldn't take you too long before you cry "house!". Many of these 'contemporary' modes of practice, of course, are instantly recognisable as regurgitations; 'done befores', by some-one like me who has been involved in the arts for almost four decades and anyone else who has read anything on the arts written since, say, 1970. Deep Mapping was used as a tool in psychogeographical experiments by French Situationist artists in the 1960s. Long before that, Boswell and Johnson's account of their Hebridean Tour published in 1785 could be construed as an example of Deep Mapping. But that's OK I suppose, the truism nothing new under the sun still holds fast; plenty of people love the music of Franz Ferdinand, whereas all I hear is Josef K and Orange Juice in the grim Glasgow of the late 1970s. I digress...
Unless you 'deep map' your artistic territory, whether physically, historically, orally, contextually, (preferably as part of a group activity), it seems that today, as far as some curators and cultural agencies are concerned, you are failing to really get to know your surroundings and are consequently just not engaging fully in the 'local' (whatever that signifies; many artists are concerned with more geographically expansive concerns and are not necessarily constrained by their work manifesting itself through the lens of the local). However, it follows that as an artist concerned with, embedded in, and taking inspiration and interest from your environs, if you do not follow some contemporary tenets of practice regarding Deep Mapping; the interview, the artist's workshop, the socially engaged environmentally linked 'project' then your work is somewhat lacking. This is patent non-sense and should be challenged.
Artists have always been involved in some form of deep mapping; any decent artist who's work is figurative for example, will have studied anatomy; literally putting flesh on the bones. A painting or drawing of the human figure by one who lacks even rudimentary knowledge of the skeletal structure will have all the intrinsic flatness, insubstantial wrongness, as one copied from a photograph; the artist unable to look at form in the round and see the cylindrical shapes which make up most of the human body and know the underlying topography which acts upon muscle and skin. Additionally, the most successful drawings made directly from the subject often accompany a previous knowledge of that person, through conversation and friendship, familial connection, relationship, sometimes sexual, which presages the drawing act. Deep knowledge of the subject will subtly imbue the artist's depiction of their subject with something intangible.
The collecting of information, visually in sketchbooks, anecdotally from conversation, the gathering of certain 'numinous' objects for future still life painting, the amassing of referential images from the past for example, all equate to deep mapping. In other words; research and development to enrich new work. The fact that I know the incoming tide will bring in the summer haar from the North Sea and with the outgoing tide, it will recede, is intrinsic knowledge born from living in an environment which colours my work. Pub conversations have enlightened me to the fact that our house is built very near to a plague pit dating from the early 1600s; gravestones embedded in garden walls nearby testify to that fact. Further research told me that the old radio station above Stonehaven around which I walk the dog, was a crucially important, exclusive conduit for radio communications during rescue efforts during the Piper Alpha disaster 30 years ago. It's difficult to view the now derelict structure with that knowledge in mind. But where does local archivism end and the work of artist's begin? That's a tricky question but perhaps the answer is as fundamental as local knowledge being passed through the conduit of an artistic sensibility and realised in visual terms where 'local mapping' is not explicit, but is implicit in the work. Put simply, the work would not exist as it does visually, without that local knowledge colouring and becoming embedded within it.
I don't need examples on how to 'deep map' my environs; I've been engaged in it for years to feed and develop my work as an artist. More importantly perhaps, the many folk I've had conversations with over a protracted period have been involved too and with that comes a curiosity and appreciation not just for my work as an artist, but the work of artists in general. "What do artists do all day?" They're mapping the world in visual terms.
The above written in response to an MA seminar on Deep Mapping.