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

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The directionality of the Apollonian gaze is from outside the earth, ‘downwards’ or ‘inwards’, apprehending the planet as an object in space. In this way, no shadows fall on the painted map surfaces, and the notion of time implicit in the physical relation between the sun and the earth is suppressed, or not selected for depiction, in the composite map that Targets presents.

The Glendale History Society asked me to make some maps for a series of heritage walking routes around Wooler. Remember, if you don’t want to cut up a particular map but want to include it in this project, you can always use a photocopy. 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.From there, they could be as creative as they wished, using colors, designs, and patterns to fill in spaces, with any materials they had handy. The panels are curtailed at the base where they meet the floor – the area in which the viewer stands – and at the top where they meet around an oculus above which is mounted a bright light, giving a uniform illumination into the viewing space.

Even though many of the maps are out of date and not of actual practical use, I keep them as crafting and upcycling resources. v] The relationships between Foucault’s work on spatiality and geography, knowledge, and the critique of power have been elaborated by Stuart Elden and Jeremy Crampton (2007). The painted panels are formed of canvas stretched on wooden frames, and while the external supports resemble lines of latitude and longitude, they also suggest “a bathysphere or an early spaceship or perhaps a giant hand grenade” (Princenthal and Earenfight, 2008, p. While the human ‘inhabitant’ of the operator’s position is removed from directly inhabiting the viewpoint, and so is removed from direct danger, the viewpoint is also produced through the embodied, and positional, labour of many workers. 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.The specific histories of each ‘target status’, each bombing campaign, are not themselves depicted in the artwork. She earned her teaching credential in visual art in California with the single minded purpose to teach overseas, which led to four years in Bahrain teaching IB/High School Art and five years in Saudi Arabia, where she fell in love with elementary education. Looking again at Targets, near the words ‘MATA KHAN’, and near the meeting point of what I take to be a line of latitude and a line of longitude, but which looks like crosshairs, I also read the word ‘SOLTANI’. Launching a mapping project in art class was an experiment I’ve wanted to try for years, and now I had a brand-new laboratory.