For two weeks, the Air Gallery in Dover Street plays host to an exhibition that focuses on the intricate, scientific and highly subjective visual form of cartography...
Who? For two weeks, The Air Gallery in Dover Street plays host to an exhibition that focuses on an intricate, scientific and highly subjective art form: cartography. Featuring established artists such as Grayson Perry and Simon Patterson, as well as work by Dahlia Elsayed and Heidi Whitman, who have never before shown in the UK, The Art of Mapping is an intriguing exploration of an ancient medium, seeing the map rearranged in an array of unconventional forms.
What? Despite being patently designed to inform and illuminate, the exhibition plays on cartography’s capacity to exaggerate and distort; a power it acquires mainly through the viewer’s pre-conceived expectation that what they are viewing is trustworthy and, by its very nature, accurate. Here maps are shown to be tools of propaganda, dissemblance and even deliberate confusion; indeed this most prosaic of products is re-imagined variously as a political manifesto, as in Justine Smith’s rendering of the world as structured by time zones and bank notes; as a construction of pop-culture detritus sculpted into religious iconography, such as in Gonkar Gyatso’s fragmented Buddha; or, for Stephen Walter, as a testament of personal history, where the streets of London are shown as tangled drawings featuring the artist’s own memories. The Great Bear, Patterson's iconic reimagining of the London tube map, in which station names are replaced with a disparate array of kings and comedians, saints and celebrites, becomes at once an absurdity, devoid of useful information; yet at the same time an object of fascination.
Why? Recognising the map as an item consistently loaded with political, geographical and social implications, this exhibition sees the concept of the map reconfigured in innumerable ways, from Claire Brewster, who has recycled the pages of an atlas to create intricate birds and curious stencilled papercuts, to Neal Beggs’ Skye Starmap which is pictorally a constellation, while actually a terrestrial map of the Isle of Skye. These are maps as social commentary, as exploration, as humorous obfuscation and as deeply personal narratives, and as such these works represent a journey not only into the minds of the artists, but also into the idea of cartography as a product of history and, vitally, profoundly, as a product of our modern times.
The Art of Mapping, curated by TAG Fine Arts, runs until November 26th at The Air Gallery, Dover Street.
Suggested Reading: See other reinterpretations of the Tube Map design here.
Text by Tish Wrigley
