Free

Tuesday, May 21
Open House 2pm-7pm

Wednesday, May 22
Open House 10am - 3pm; 5 pm-7pm
Artist Talk at 6pm

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels.

For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I will embrace the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might happen when people also enter the space. I envision hundreds of cut maps hanging from the beams, perhaps randomly, perhaps in a specific layout. 

I’m interested in how people will interact with them - will they wait for permission to touch them, to walk through them? Will they worry about damaging the individual pieces, or see themselves as part of the installation, as catalysts for changing it? Will they be delighted, or irritated, by the pieces being in their way? If, at the end of the project, I tell them they can take a small piece of it home, will they embrace that idea, or see it as destroying the whole?

I have a sense of the installation being somewhat representative of the world, in particular the fragility of the planet and how we are failing to take care of it. But I also like the idea that it spreads through the community and parts of it live on wherever people put the pieces that they take. I see the whole as ephemeral and removing some of the individual elements does not diminish it. And maybe, during future iterations of the installation, more will be added, and it will continually evolve; perhaps becoming a permanent part of my art practice.

Sian Robertson grew up in South West Wales, in the UK. She received a BEd (Hons) from Rolle College in Exmouth, Devon and went on to work in the union and non-profit sectors in both Bristol and London until moving to America in 1992. After seven years in San Francisco she settled on Cape Cod running retail stores and working in an art gallery in Provincetown. Robertson has never received any formal art training but has been cutting and pasting, amongst many other creative pursuits, since she was about eight.

In 2023 Robertson was the recipient of the Juror’s Award at the International Society of Experimental Artists’s annual show, Innovations, held at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod. Robertson’s Postage Portraits were featured in Uppercase Magazine in 2015, and her Map Sculptures in the same publication in 2020. Robertson teaches classes at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.