Piled Up is made by Jackie Partridge. I created this artwork during my Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University. To learn more about the artwork, Piled Up keep reading!
Piled Up BY Jackie Partridge
What do we carry with us, even when we think we’ve left something behind?
In Piled Up, I explore the weight of memory, travel, and place using a material most of us associate with planning, movement, and orientation: the map.
About Piled Up:
Atlas cut-outs, plywood, shelf-10.5”x 8”, floor piece- 4’x 2.5’, 2018
Piled Up uses the cut-outs from What Is and What Was to create a hill of houses that spills over onto the floor.
Slicing Through Geography to Tell a Story
This work was created using hand-cut pages from an old atlas. Each piece of paper—once a road, a river, a contour line—is carefully layered and collaged into a sculptural form that suggests both accumulation and fragility.
The piece is tactile and textural, built up like strata, like the stories we gather as we move through the world. It’s a meditation on how locations shape identity—and how we mentally and emotionally “pile up” the places we’ve been.
Why Maps?
Maps are a material I return to often in my work. They’re beautiful in their own right, with delicate lines, typography, and colours—but they’re also loaded with meaning.
We rely on maps to tell us where we are, yet they often feel out of date, incomplete, or disconnected from the lived experience of place. By cutting and rearranging them, I’m reconfiguring geography into something more intuitive, personal, and emotional.
The Form of a Stack, The Feeling of a Memory
The composition of Piled Up—layered, uneven, slightly precarious—mirrors how we store memories. It’s not linear. It’s a build-up of fragments, connections, impressions.
There’s a quiet tension in the form. It’s a pile, but it could also be a monument, a map of experience, or even a burden. I wanted the piece to feel both grounded and uncertain, like a journey without a clear destination.
A Piece Rooted in Time and Place
Whether you’re a traveller, a collector of stories, or someone who feels deeply tied to home, Piled Up invites you to reflect on how we hold onto places—and how places hold onto us.
The piece fits beautifully in a space that invites reflection: a study, hallway, cottage, or living room. It’s part visual poetry, part cartographic sculpture.
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