Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research
11. - 12. September 2025
Iceland University of the Arts
Sabine Pagan
Lecturer in Object Design in the School of Creative Arts and Media at the University of Tasmania.
Sabine Pagan is a professional artist and educator, with over twenty years of experience in studio-based teaching. Originally trained as a jeweller in Switzerland, she later earned a PhD (Arch) from the University of South Australia (2016). Sabine currently holds an academic position in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her creative practice spans interdisciplinary, collaborative and curatorial projects across the fields of art, design and architecture. Her research focuses on the sensory aspect of human experience, examining how objects, people and environments interact and influence one another. Through fieldwork and deep mapping methodologies, her work engages with themes of materiality and place-making, examining how memory and lived experiences shape - and are shaped by - the spaces we inhabit.
New digital technologies such as Geographical Information System (GIS) and photogrammetry are changing the way we collate and interpret data in the social sciences and spatial humanities. These technologies provide new systems to analyse findings more accurately through layers of deep maps. Such approaches, I argue, are inherently incomplete without integrating human perspectives and suggest that deep mapping methodologies used in the creative arts could improve our understanding and knowledge of artefacts, society and places.
The concept of deep mapping first developed by cartographer, artist and author Tim Robinson (1935-2020) reveals the irreplaceable value of human intervention in understanding our place in the world. Drawing from the interdisciplinary knowledge from cartographers, linguists, geologists, ethnographers amongst others, deep mapping methodologies aim to unsettle the systems by which these disciplines operate, providing alternate ways of collecting and interpreting data to offer new perspectives and deeper meaning.
In this paper, I present works from my exhibition Geomorph (2024) as an examplar of deep mapping methodology. Informed by a recent move to Tasmania (Australia) by the shores of kanamaluka (River Tamar), the work connects historical, geographical, and cultural narratives told through material language from my perspective as an artist and educator. Central to these narratives is the human experience that forms an integral part to the deep mapping discourse, bringing fluidity, instability and a sense of surprise, for each experience is unique.
Unstable systems present a necessary challenge, one that propels creative and analytical advancement. The concept of deep mapping affirms the importance of human experience in shaping unstable systems by weaving a continuous thread between place, space and time. Geomorph acts as the thread and its multimodality is captured through ongoing iterations presented as a suite of exhibitions.