In this project, I’m exploring mapmaking as a mutually formative process between the body and the landscape. By carrying a plate with me in a backpack wherever I go, I record my movements onto etching plates; one plate each month, for eighteen months and counting. Each plate produces a print, and each print serves as a record; of the friction between a body and the world; of the physical marks made by my everyday life; of my actions and activity. Each page is paired with a list of recollections from that month. Mapmaking becomes an embodied process of mark-making.

Exhibited in the form of an open-ended accordion book, Backpack Tracks is an evolving map of movement and memory over space and time, showing how my body “writes” the landscape, just as it writes me.