Whether it be the heart-shaped form of Take heart, or the quartered globe of Southern Compass, one of Ruth Watson’s concerns is to draw our attention to alternative ways of imaging the world. Through working with projections displaced in the history of mapping, or otherwise at odds with entrenched conventions of cartography, Watson emphasises how thoroughly contingent common depictions of the world are. They are both motivated by and construct conceptions of communication and contact, production and consumption, movement and travel, departure and arrival, borders and boundaries. Maps are curious things; they are abstractions that can move or ensnare both bodies and minds.

In L'Origine du Monde, the map is roughly circular, but has an anomalous hollow in the interior; this gap or fold in the world is heart-shaped. It is a square root equal area projection invented by the mathematician Waldo Tobler. And it’s an unsettling image of the globe; against the grain of ubiquitous conventional map projections, it looks like another world.