Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists

Product Information

This provides a rich framework for critical inquiry into some of the visual aspects of social modalities of abstraction [viii], treating the image as a site of inquiry into material processes of abstraction, processes of abstraction that are not confined to the visual, and so should not be studied using one disciplinary approach. Rather than ‘seeing through’ maps to a posited underlying reality, instead maps are means of constructing knowledge and “making a world” (ibid, p.

This is absolutely stunning, this is beautiful," Ed Fairburn remarked as he flipped through maps in his studio Southampton, on England's south coast. This development has taken place in parallel with the emergence of geographical interest in western Marxism, and vice versa, from the 1970s, particularly in the French context (Soja, 1989).Artist Ed Fairburn, left, shows CBS News correspondent Ian Lee some of his work at his studio in Southampton, England. In large-scale mixed-media works, Mark Bradford focuses on the geography of Los Angeles and uses the process and strategy of mapmaking as a starting point. Interestingly, one of Apollo’s less-frequent attributes in classical sculpture is a globe, symbolising his universality (ibid).

The internalisation of this disciplinary gaze in the viewed subject perpetuates the dynamic of domination and submission. The map is an outcome of processes, and it generates further processes through its circulation and reception in the world. I offer a new theoretical framework for understanding how we go about the complex process of ‘seeing with maps’. I use a close reading of a selected area of Targets to open out questions of map interpretation in light of the recognition of maps as irreducibly both graphic images and texts. Inhabiting the centre of the walk-in globe, the viewer is closely surrounded by painted maps of target countries, and it is through reading Targets’ imaginative geographies that critical reading of the power in this viewpoint is both forwarded and nuanced.It is as a remote reader, then, that I offer a partial reading of Targets, that remains one of many potential readings of the work. It operates by compiling, or synopsising, a view that is non-perspectival so that we see all parts of the mapped terrain as though from directly overhead simultaneously. Images that use this viewpoint therefore enact a view that cannot be understood to position the viewer anywhere in particular, and therefore may be said to position the viewer nowhere [ix].

The height of the drone’s eye view is variable, and while emerging forms of weaponised and non-weaponised drones are increasingly able to operate at human height, critical discussion has so far focussed mainly on the higher altitude mode of drone viewing, which is also characteristic of contemporary military practices. My approach in this case draws on Hawkins’ discussion of the encounter with the artwork, but acknowledges that the nature of my encounter as a reader is not that of a spectator in the installation. The initial view of a contained, coherent whole in Targets gives way to the detailed geographies of the fractured selections from the world that may be read from a closer viewing position – that available within the installation. From the outside, one sees that the ‘painting’ is made of twenty-four wedge-shaped, curved plywood panels that come together to form a sphere, their joints forming the latitudes and longitudes. Future plans include heritage railways of England, wine regions of the world, theatres of London, a rum map of the Caribbean, distilleries of Ireland, a cheese map of Europe, and maps of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Newcastle.The directionality of the Apollonian gaze is from outside the earth, ‘downwards’ or ‘inwards’, apprehending the planet as an object in space. In the context of a ‘perverted’ and ‘inverted’ reality (Loftus 2015) we need more innovative and multivalent approaches to visual images that are engaging with some of the methods through which this reality is formed and how it continues to be reproduced. Having proposed that it is not straightforwardly countries themselves that find depiction in Targets’ painted maps, in reading images of the work it is hard to overlook the point that many of the segments feature a country name fairly prominently, in larger lettering, such that they may be read across Targets’ surface like phrases or sentences lacking their grammar: Nicaragua-Korea-Peru-Afghanistan-Cuba, Nicaragua-Korea [xiv]-Peru-Yugoslavia-Kuwait/Iraq, Nicaragua-Kosovo-Bosnia-Korea. In 2019 she was thrilled to be the TEDx faculty speaker for the American International School – Riyadh, and used contemporary art and artists as models for contemporary multidisciplinary education as her topic. This particular map of the island of Lindisfarne took two months to make from start to finish; just the shading of the sea took over three hours!