Luna has been making maps for some time. This one, in red felt is one of her most complex, it contains our house, the largest, to the left, including all of our garden beds, large and small, the five dots are our family, Rob, myself, Luna, Blake and Austin The Cat. Top right is the grandparents, and their dog, lower right is my mums house, with uncle Timmy and the cats, again dots. Each destination is an hour two away, so we see fields and gardens, as well as two friends homes (added later in orange felt) along the lines. I like the fenced field at the bottom of the picture, and I love that she included our gardens, and that animals are equal to humans!
At first they started out as long circular or oval shapes depending on the size and shape of the paper, they would be punctuated with small shapes, lines connecting at various points, often filled with dots. This one, below, is an earlier map.
Luna created this one when we went on a family holiday for Homebirth Hui last year, lots of friends there, lots of new faces, lovely food, a new beach and play ground, and a huge sports field to explore. Her world expanded in a matter of days. She filled every page in my notebook with these maps, though she told me the story or meaning of the drawings sometime after she drew them. For me, it is an interesting insight into her world.
I tend to forget that the world she knows is different to the one I know, we have friends and family living and working overseas, we talk about them often and what they do, and we have a couple of maps on the wall. Locations on the map or my globe feature in many conversations, so it is fascinating to see her representation of the/her world.
And that maps are abstract interpretations anyway!
mermaids purse 