Constructing a World View: Reconstructing a Journey (The Travels of Thomas Muir, Younger, of Huntershill)
There are two parts to the piece: on one wall a painted drawing of a world map, and, on the facing wall, a list of dates and co-ordinates. The map floats in a space larger than itself -- a projection of the world with Northern Europe as its centre, the familiar shapes of the far-flung other stretching and sagging out of recognition. This oddly deflated image is moored to the wall by a network of arcs representing selected lines of longitude and latitude. Thus are conflated two methods of depicting the roundness of reality on the flat plane of a basement wall.
One of the joys offered by maps is the space to dream. Staring into a map we begin to drift in space and time, remembering some journeys, imagining others. Into this free-ranging space the artist introduces a particular itinerary, a schematic rendering of the travels, undertaken between 1792 and 1799, of a Scottish political reformer and activist, an unwilling world traveler. The freedom to dream and the dream of freedom both enmeshed in the trajectory of an individual passage.
For the past several years the Lawson has been researching the life of Thomas Muir, this political figure, seeking a way to re-imagine a key moment in the development of the modern idea of representative democracy, in order to explore issues pertaining to truth and representation, especially in relation to contemporary art.