Having taken images from the Ten Year Pioneer Plan (1953 – 1963) mapped by Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í faith. I choose to look at the maps for their aesthetic beauty and not just the practical cartographic purpose of their creation. Then I assembled those images into collages which I hoped would manifest another element of beauty which was latent but unseen in their original form.
This small project serves as metaphor for art revealing the abundant hidden beauty which exists in the world of creation but is often unnoticed by the fleeting eye due to life’s preoccupations. The busyness of doing often strips away the opportunity to absorb what joy may be right there in front of us in everyday scenes… whether natural of human-constructed.
This undertaking was not intended to represent any revised strategic statement of the Ten Year Plan maps; only an aesthetic manipulation for simple pleasure of the perceiving eye. The bright colours and geometric shapes – arrows, circles, lettering listing place names, radial lines and symbols saturated in radiant hues spill across the territories of our unfolded globe. Everything profoundly intended in its purpose but also styled in an illuminating arrangement.
