Let Ingrid Dabringer draw you a map

When you’ve lived in as many places as Ingrid Dabringer, maps take on a whole different meaning. So she decided to illustrate that… literally. Dabringer was born in Vienna, then lived in Indonesia, Lebanon, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador and the US by the time she was 13. After getting a film degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, she went to our very own Massachusetts College of Art. There, she studied sculpture and education with a focus on woodworking, felting and plaster. In her current work, Dabringer says that the lines she finds in her maps determine the evolving figures in a way that demonstrates how we’re all looking for meaning. We look at a map and try to see a face the way that we try to find a narrative in life. But she asks, “Do they exist simply to illustrate the random and whimsical nature of life? Humans have an insatiable need to find meaning—even from that which is fleeting or random. The more meaning we assign, the more we triangulate our location within ourselves and our communities.”

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