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

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In her earlier career, Kozloff worked on a number of public art projects and commissions emphasising abstract geometrical pattern, and particularly with an interest in unsettling the boundaries between pattern as decoration and pattern as a visual register with the capacity to shift the atmosphere of a built space. By this I mean the naturalised apprehension of the earth as a homogeneous space that is naturally, even necessarily, understood as regular, consistent and objective.

I initially favoured ‘synoptic’ because of its meaning of "furnishing a general view of some subject", "taking a combined or comprehensive view" (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). We work with local printing partners to produce our prints closest to you, reducing carbon emmisons by 67%. Harley also argues for recognising the importance of both the textual aspects of maps, and interpreting maps as texts: “Within the frame of one map there may be several texts – ‘an intertextuality’ – that has to be uncovered in the interpretative process” (ibid, p.

However, remembering Kozloff’s idea of claustrophobia, and Wood’s ‘devastating’ encounter, I read a form of control and limitation in the viewing experience of Targets’ disjointed maps as one is unable to scroll up or down, unfold the next section of the map, or turn the globe to read the adjoining area. In terms of embodiment and positionality, the god’s eye view is de-embodied, while still figuring the ‘position’ of a consciousness. In that context, I also briefly consider Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) central theoretical contribution to this area, the framework of space as a concrete abstraction. This theme is prominent in the work’s form as a pair of installation paintings, each in the shape of twelve gores, or vertical segments of the globe, flattened and abutting one another in a row, in a reference to sixteenth-century world maps. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.

The god’s eye view imagines the capacity to view from ‘nowhere in particular’ (Gregory, 2014), similarly to the view from nowhere, to be outside of both time and space, and to confer authority and power on the viewing position thus constructed. Wood argues persuasively that the fifteenth century should be seen as a key turning point in the history of maps, marking the beginning of an exponential increase in their production, circulation, use and cultural and political impacts. I was hoping they would answer me through their artistic intentions and choices for what to map out.The map projects or provides not only its content but also guidance as to how that content should be interpreted.