Polygon Landscape was made by cutting forty shapes from 2m x 1m sheets of triwall cardboard and laid out on the floor of the Kandos Scout Hall for identification by local residents or anyone with a visual memory of the town. Each polygon is the outline-shape of the street-view of a randomly selected Kandos house, with outline-details such as chimneys and eaves removed for ease of cutting (by circular saw) and internal detail deleted through the use of blank triwall cardboard (making polygons light to carry home). The challenge this loss of detail creates for identification was not without purpose, however.
I made these shapes partly because I like ambiguous shapes, and especially those that are derived from actual ‘objective’ and ‘known’ things. This is because firstly they usually are shapes that are more unexpected and challenging than I would make up myself. Secondly, when sufficient detail is lost, familiar shapes can become surprisingly unfamiliar and float off into being other things, making you wonder what familiar things actually look like and how you know what something familiar actually is. It is as if by reducing detail and information, more room can be made for thought and reflection.
It is not just visual detail that is reduced by this sort of representation, of course, its that this reduction is in addition to the reduction of one’s lived knowledge of a place to selective visual clues only. When I think about the place where I actually live, I realise I know it least by what it looks like, and more by the ways I physically occupy it, and would have trouble identifying it just from its shape. This seemed to also be true for visitors to <i>Polygon Landscape</i>, who also needed the accompanying thumb-print images to realise which house each of the 40 polygons represented, even when it was their own.
As abstract and ambiguous shapes, some of the polygons are more interesting to me than others, and I could see that some fosterings seemed to be made on that basis as well. But as I had hoped, some people who eventually recognised a polygon and asked to take it home, said they were doing so for other reasons such as historical or personal connections to the houses represented.
So far about a third of the polygons have been taken into the care of the home they represent or fostered into others—the rest are initially stored at Kandos Projects, and later will be brought to Sydney for further fostering. Progess in fostering and images of polygons in their ‘new’ homes are being uploaded onto > www.margaretroberts.org/POLYGON.html and linked pages.