This is a portrait of a Shipibo woman I met while studying in the Amazon. I tried combining photos I took with pastel illustration. This was done in response to my questions about traveling as an observer, student, artist, and foreigner. 

In Tim Cresswell's book, Defining Place: A Short Introduction, he explains that places are “made, maintained, and contested” out of landscapes and spaces. Cresswell explains places as a pause in space. This resonated for me; making place is a subjective action, it is a way of looking at the world, a perspective as well as a physical object. Place became a defining basis to look at the relationships between local and global, familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown as undercurrents of my motivations to travel. (This is an excerpt from an artist statement I wrote in college).