The paintings of Sarah Trigg: “Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts, and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains that are part landscape, part bodyscape.”

Mixing the map and medicine metaphors is not accidental:

Her “Metastatic Explorer” series began with a map of early Native American tribe territories and languages from The National Atlas of the United States of America. On top of that she layered the routes of European explorers from the 1600s through the 1800s. “The idea was to get a sample, like a doctor would biopsy a tissue, of several systems that were developing in the United States around that time,” Trigg says. “I found it interesting that the explorer system seemed to develop with no regard to the forms of the Native American system — despite having to contend with the same geography. And eventually the explorer system caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells.”

More on Trigg (along with some other samples of her work) here, here and here; she also has a home page. Via Kottke.