This work is about space. In working, Avellana Ord feels less that she is making an image and more that she is creating a landscape out of a feeling. She was asked last semester, “Are you mapping yourself?”—a question she had not considered, but which has since become central to her practice and theory. Drawing and walking are much the same for her; she is mapping, plotting. Both are acts she has escaped into as a kind of medicine to treat trauma. Escape is the wrong word, though. She does these things to swim in her own existence.

Avellana is connected to the term Genius Loci; since childhood, she has always had a strong sense of the personality belonging to areas of land. This exists in populated places, too, but it is harder to hear them. There have been times, since she was a child, when she has felt so disconnected from her own body that it became a landscape, and she disappeared into its imperfections as if it no longer belonged to her. Her body is a space, and the land is a space, and in quiet, liminal landscapes, they are talking. She is tracking the entanglement of this by drawing another space—the one we can’t see.