She earned her teaching credential in visual art in California with the single minded purpose to teach overseas, which led to four years in Bahrain teaching IB/High School Art and five years in Saudi Arabia, where she fell in love with elementary education. I use them for decoupage, from large items such as map chairs to smaller things such as Mason jars, cookie tins and shells. However, the artist understands the map paintings to relate, not strictly to countries, but to bombing campaigns carried out by the US [xii]. My most recent brand-new maps are Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain, which started out as commissions for a book, and were expanded upon to be sold as prints.

I then explore the question of how the artwork may be ‘read’ as an approach to encountering and responding to the work as a ‘remote viewer’.

The students responded strongly to Yin’s Portable Cities and were especially fascinated by her use of used clothes. However, the viewer’s experience of Targets as a source of information and historical instruction depends on their prior knowledge.

The ‘representation view’ is “a projection, as it were, of the map itself, the map as it would like to be understood” (ibid, p. In terms of embodiment and positionality, the god’s eye view is de-embodied, while still figuring the ‘position’ of a consciousness. Focussing on Targets as enacting a panoptic viewing position, it is through reading the work’s imaginative geographies that critical reading of the power in the panoptic and view from nowhere is both forwarded and nuanced.

I used this atlas as a kind of armchair travel guide, imagining all the places in the world I would eventually visit. Looking again at Targets, near the words ‘MATA KHAN’, and near the meeting point of what I take to be a line of latitude and a line of longitude, but which looks like crosshairs, I also read the word ‘SOLTANI’. In the centre, my eye is first drawn to the diagonal word ‘AFGHANISTAN’, written in block capitals, slanted downward across a field of dark yellow. McLean uses various visualisation formats to map her data, which she gathers alone or with the help of collaborators.