Map of Westport Drumlin

The challenge here was to design and illustrate a one color 8.5" X 8.5" map incorporating a long list of specific plant illustrations while maintaining the identity of a functional map. Oh, and it was also supposed to feel like a work of art. The trick in keeping it clean and clearly legible was to restrict myself to three halftone levels distinctively seperated from each other and calculated to remain so after dot gain on press.

Map of The Driftless Area

Trout Unlimited plays an active role in safegaurding watersheds. Much of their effort in the upper Midwest has focused on the Driftless Area and the preservation of water quality in this very special geological region.The Driftless area straddles four Midwestern states: Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This area remained untouched by glaciers as an island of uplifted land and as such, it wasn't scoured by the plow of glacial ice. The area is filled with unique and or unusual geological features, flora, and fauna.

The Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society in 2004 focused on the legacy of Aldo Leopold, the great ecologist. In creating this image I established an interconnected web of black line shapes that linked life forms with their surroundings which makes it difficult to separate one shape from another without destroying the whole. I used vector art which is infinitely scalable so that the relationships between forms would be no less clear, no less true and accurate regardless of printed scale. Life is interconnected.

The Sauk Prairie School District hosted "Between Fences", a Smithsonian Museum on Main Street exhibit as the result of successful grant writing and fund raising efforts of River Arts, inc., a non-profit arts presentation organization based in the community. The group is associated with the Sauk Prairie School District. Major funding for this program was administered through the Wisconsin Humanities Council and involved the creation of a community centered exhibit focusing on the theme of land, place, and space. This piece as well as a series of limited edition prints featured in the border vignettes was part of a traveling exhibit.

The core group pulling together the Sauk Prairie portion of this exhibit solicited a proposal for an art piece focusing on fences as part of their community specific presentation. I was fortunate enough to be selected to create the piece. The huge map addresses history, sociology, land use and land features, as well as the physical and metaphorical nature of fences in the Sauk Prairie School District. Limited edition prints of each vignette and smaller versions of the map were sold to raise additional funds for the project.

A SaukPrairie Meander won the People's Choice Award in the map poster competition at the WLIA (Wisconsin Land Information Association) 2009 Annual Conference at the Kalahari Resort. The WLIA Conferenceis the premier GIS (Geographic Information Systems) conference in Wisconsin emphasizing local, regional, statewide and federal trends, issues,and applications related to geographic information.

This was the initial print for the Between Fences Proposal designed to be both a poster and the keystone image for A Sauk Prairie Meander. It captures the tone for the entire piece. This image ties together the legal system, the idea of property, and the measuring boundaries of ownership with the notion of fences. The myth of justice and law enforcement empowers this idea. Without a belief in the justice system and the idea of ownership rights, fences would mean much less to us.

Each of the vignettes surrounding the map were marketed as stand-alone prints for fund raising purposes.

The importance of Badger Ordnance is depicted here. This is and was a high security area with fences to keep the outside and inside protected from each other. People's lives were affected by this plant in both negative and positive ways. Badger played an important role for our nation and even the world. People in the area lost property due to Badger being built. People were employed because Badger was built. And people were protected from fascism because this plant was built.

The Sauk Prairie School District sits on land shaped by the powerful forces of nature and chief amongst these were glacier and river and both relate to each other. The hills and river now form natural barriers that serve as fences that shape the district boundaries. This image depicts the glacial wall plowing up the hills and melting to form rivers and lakes.

In many of the other images depicting fences the hills are shown as barriers that parallel the depicted fences. This is intentional to encourage people to think about fences in as open minded and inclusive a fashion as possible. Myth and metaphor are never far from the real and physical in this story of fences.

This is one of two horizontal images located on the top edge of the map.

Fences can be physical and cultural. The Battle of Wisconsin Heights took place in 1832 as part of the Black Hawk War. Chief Black Hawk and his people were hounded and pursued to the Wisconsin Heights area near Sauk City and the militia and military believed they were pinned down against the river. Black Hawk held off the army with a small number of warriors while organizing his starving people to build rafts and escape across the barrier of the river at night using this "fence" to his advantage.

This image deals with the fences concept as metaphor and as physical boundary as well as mental construct. Black Hawk thought outside of the white man's box and thereby escaped the box. This image pays tribute to the military legend of Black Hawk as a strategist and also to the history of the area. The battle of Wisconsin Heights has been described as the most important event in Wisconsin history.

Troy Community Gardens is a green-built, mixed income housing, and prairie restoration project in Madison, Wisconsin. It's an exciting place that has sparked a great deal of positive attention as an urban planning project. In the early stages of this project I was hired by The Urban Open Space Foundation to create several "3D'" renderings of the grounds to be used in their initial signage. On the right is one of the illustrations created to help visitors understand the lay of the land. The left represents the area to lower left of the larger overview.

Madison "Art Pedaler" Screen Print Posters: 2009, 2010, 2011