by Samantha Perry
Spring 2017 Intern
A lot of my early memories seem to
take place in the car with me sitting in the backseat with my siblings. We
always had a stack of maps with us in the car, usually tucked into the pockets
behind the seats or on the floor beneath our feet. During family trips, I loved
looking through the maps and tracing my fingers along the outline of the coast
or over the serpentine curve of roads that stretched out across the page. To
me, the maps I looked through on these trips played just an important role as
the memories I made with my family during our adventures.
Even though our relationship with
maps might be changing in the digital age, artists are still finding ways to
incorporate maps in their work. You can easily spend hours losing yourself down
a rabbit hole of map-themed art, including those that specifically use old maps
as a medium. Some are collages of maps that create people’s faces, others are ghost-like
sculptures of bodies made out of pages of rivers and roads. One artist,
Elisabeth Lecourt, even makes clothing
out of maps!
Other artists enjoy putting a
graphic twist on maps. A common cartographic interpretation features typography.
Artists
like Nancy McCabe strip out everything but the continental outlines of
world maps, and fill the “land” proportionately with text in a variety of
typefaces, colors and font sizes. Some of these font maps have country and city
names sized by area or population, others create the “land” with keywords that
apply to the area.
Some other great examples of map
art can be found on the website Mapping
London. I spent four months living in London during my junior year of
college, so looking at these maps brings back a lot of great memories! The
website includes hundreds of different renderings of maps of the London
Underground (“the Tube”), a map of ghost
story locations in a Pac-Man layout, a typographic map of the different
greetings from the many prevalent languages used in the city and a map
detailing the olfactory
level of each street. The street I lived on was pretty stinky according to
this map!
Did You Know?
There are 270 Tube stations, each
of which inspired a graphic design by artist Mark Wallinger. Labyrinth is a collection of maze-like maps rendered in minimalistic
black, white and red graphics. Each station’s unique labyrinth has a red X to
mark your starting position at the entrance of the Tube station, and you are encouraged
to trace the path that represents your journey.
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