Day #805 - Boundaries
Liminal Space
The illustrations for the new book have a common design element, in that they reverse the scale of the landscape, and contain the broadest vistas within the smallest shapes. Over the last few months I’ve been steadily working through them, and at an increased pace as we get to the end, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time sketching details
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That means that I am constantly drawing mountain ranges and skies, rivers and forests, towns and rolling fields. Or more specifically, I am delineating the boundaries between them.
The notion of ‘Boundaries’ has become increasingly prominent in my work more broadly, from Social Leadership ‘at the intersection of systems’ - a boundary - through to the new Planetary Philosophy work, which proposes a philosophy of motion.
The idea of liminal, edge-land spaces, how how rules and conditions vary in such spaces, just seems endlessly fascinating, leading to writing about leadership as ‘Trespass’, as well as situating the New York and London ‘Dereliction Walks’ at the boundaries of our urban environment (guiding small groups though edge-land spaces as we illustrate core ideas as situated our built landscape).
Edge-lands correlate with and understanding of tacit and tribal knowledge as well: semi-hidden, fluid, distributed. All systems have boundaries, it’s part of the definition. But leadership does not simply happen ‘within’. It’s a whole of system feature, and a trans-system, interconnected one
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