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

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The Garden now sells them on 1000 piece jigsaws which are popular, and it’s given me the idea of creating some jigsaws of my own.

Maps can be ways to explore the world, to learn about other cultures and traditions, to get in touch with one’s ancestry, and to recognize them as byproducts of human civilization. My focus on the effect that viewing in this relation may have on the viewer comes directly from my reading of the artwork itself; I draw on the panoptic and the Apollonian as modes of abstract viewing that enable a productive analysis of the complex form of viewing that is staged in Targets. 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]. One girl selected Sentinel Island, off the coast of India, which she described as a place disconnected from the modern world.ADIZ’ means, to me, demilitarised zone, and having never been in one, it prompts me to imagine barbed wire, planes overhead, and armed guards in watchtowers, the Berlin Wall. Dotting the ‘I’ is a small white square, which I take to be the symbol for a town, or at least a named settlement. Our intuitive customization process allows you to select from a vast palette of colors and add your own text, making it truly yours. Interestingly, one of Apollo’s less-frequent attributes in classical sculpture is a globe, symbolising his universality (ibid). It has sparked a bit of debate and conversation with my family about the places I’ve chosen to feature.

I was hoping they would answer me through their artistic intentions and choices for what to map out.

This is absolutely stunning, this is beautiful," Ed Fairburn remarked as he flipped through maps in his studio Southampton, on England's south coast. My most recent brand-new maps are Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain, which started out as commissions for a book, and were expanded upon to be sold as prints. In terms of legibility, the Apollonian gaze renders visible the earth as a whole, as an entity in space. Artist Ed Fairburn, left, shows CBS News correspondent Ian Lee some of his work at his studio in Southampton, England.

This has, in turn, led to my being able to use the idea of the abstract viewpoint as such to examine situations of viewing that are not already understood in this way. The initial view is of shapes of bright colour, varied and butting up close together, the characteristic play of the maps’ lines and symbols visible at a distance before any detail can be ascertained.

However, the viewer’s experience of Targets as a source of information and historical instruction depends on their prior knowledge. The Glendale History Society asked me to make some maps for a series of heritage walking routes around Wooler.

This modern building is poles apart from their previous school whose old home was historic and charming but crumbling under modern pressures. The NASA images of the ‘Blue Marble’ are one of most resonant instances of this viewpoint being used to visualise the earth in space (Kurgan, 2013, Cosgrove, 2001). Access for the viewer is afforded by one of the trapezoidal panels forming a door, mounted on castors, which the viewer is able to close on themselves once inside (see fig. For my son, creating a map of this place alleviated some of his feelings of loss and gave him a much-needed activity. It is non-mobile, as everything may be viewed and known from its position of ‘nowhere in particular’.

iv] See Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992), in which Jameson elaborates the notion of ‘cognitive mapping’.