freckle constellation
The movement and presence of stars are material we’ve use for millennia to mark our place in the world and navigate by. During a research trip to Ireland two years ago I visited the derelict home of my great-grandfather. As I travelled through the country, I found myself surrounded by people with the same abundance of freckles as I have. Our chaotic skins seemed to make up for the lack of stars so often obscured by the cloud cover common there. This abundance tied us to the landscape, and in response, I photographed my own freckles and made a paper map of them, interleaving pressed wildflowers as constellations (Figure 8). The paper maps hang above head-level to replace the naturally found drawing of stars in the sky with constellations of freckles. Thus I tied my inherited physical traits to the landscape of my ancestors.