Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are an incredible artistic duo based in England who have worked on a variety of related projects experimenting with trash and projected shadows. From looking at the rubbish they collect from the streets of London it is virtually impossible to determine a rhyme or reason to the apparent mess. However, once a projector is set up at just the right angle the art pops to life and animated shades are created with crisp and clear outlines delineating the controlled forms hidden with chaos.

Moss Map of Brighton

I made lots of little pots of moss to be placed over an enormous wall sized hand drawn map of Brighton. I wanted to create a living map of where people live or have lived in the city. On the opening night of the show which was held last week on Thursday for the Brighton University end of year show (the show itself was held in City College on Pelham street). I had a large green suitcase open with each little marker and by the end of the evening the map had been brought to life by these growing cultivations.

Susan Stockwell

UK artist Susan Stockwell uses maps to craft stunningly detailed dresses, often with political implications; the dress on the left is ‘Empire Dress’, a Victorian style created with maps of the British Isles, while the right-hand ‘Highland Dress’ depicts a traditional Scottish style made with maps of the Highlands. Stockton also creates ‘money maps’ including ‘America is an Imperial State’, left, made with Chinese yuan, and ‘Afghanistan – A Sorry State’, made with American dollars.

Shannon Rankin

Maine-based artist Shannon Rankin uses little discs of maps to create installations, collages and drawings “that use the language of maps to explore the connections among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy. Using a variety of distinct styles I intricately cut, score, wrinkle, layer, fold, paint and pin maps to produce revised versions that often become more like the terrains they represent.”

Ramon Espantaleón

The First Apple series by Ramón Espantaleón is a tribute to New York, particularly in light of the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Espantaleón recreates scale models of the cities in clay, painstakingly constructing each building at 1/65 scale, before using them to cast silicone molds which can then produce recreations made of epoxy resin and polyurethane. Espantaleón, a Madrid native who lived in New York on the day the World Trade Center fell, places these pixelated city blocks onto representations of the Twin Towers.

Matthew Cusick

These beautiful maps of roadways that “go nowhere”, weaving and curving around the world. “Maps provided so much potential, so many layers. I put away my brushes and decided to see where the maps would take me. I think collage is a medium perfectly suited to the complexities of our time. It speaks to a society that is over-saturated with disparate visual information. It attempts to put order to the clutter and to make something permanent from the waste of the temporary. A collage is also a time capsule; it preserves the ephemera of the past. It reconstitutes things that have been discarded. A collage must rely on a kind of alchemy; it must combine ordinary elements into something extraordinary.”

R. Luke Dubois

Touching and, at times, hilarious, these keyword maps by R. Luke Dubois associate each town with the terms most often used by locals to describe themselves and their desired partners on their online dating profiles. Dubois joined 21 dating websites and analyzed the language used in 21 million profiles to come up with the data, which was then displayed on maps. Chicagoans say things like “prankster”, “pizza”, “smoker” and “synagogue” while Central Texans are all about “churches”, “boundaries”, “barbecue” and “Madonna” – the latter presumably referring to the Virgin, not the pop star.

Nikki Rosato

Delicately interwoven like veins, the tiny green, blue and red strips of maps used to create these incredible sculptures are molded around a packing tape form to create a three-dimensional shape. Artist Nikki Rosato removes the land masses, leaving nothing but the roads and rivers behind, reinforcing the paper with wire as necessary.

“Through the removal of the land masses, the places almost become ambiguous since all of the text is lost. Unless someone really knows the roads and highways, it is almost impossible to identify the place.”

Guillermo Kuitca

Guillermo Kuitca looks upon maps as metaphors for human relationships. He routinely uses maps of individual and communal spaces as starting points for his paintings. Over the years, Kuitca’s has incorporated maps of all kinds into his work including floor plans for houses, stadiums, apartments, and prisons; seating arrangements of theaters; street plans of cities; and even family trees or genealogical charts into his work. While Kuitca’s paintings have an abstract appearance, they always have a psychological, political, or social reference.

In his series of paintings titled “People on Fire,” Kuitca brings together a community of faceless names together as one might do in a genealogical chart. These are anonymous individuals with no personal significance to Kuitca or to the viewer. We read the names as we might headstones in a cemetery. Names are color-coded by gender: male-orange, female-pink. Some spots are left blank which Kuitca sees as symbolic of the people unknown yet connected to the whole. These blanks may evoke no special feeling in the casual viewer. Yet to anyone aware of modern Argentine history, the missing names stand for the Desparecidos, the thousands of the artist’s countrymen and women who “disappeared” during the reign of terror brought by the military junta that ruled Argentina in the 1970s.

Maps...my latest obsession

Moss Traces 1988-2011(2011)

(Own Work)

Moss, paper, frame, plastic

Dimensions 350mmx300mm

‘For many living plants it is light which dictates the path they grow. For us, it is life itself which shapes our routes and how well we thrive.’

Traces 1988-2011(2011), were a set of four frames shown for a ‘First Thursday’ group exhibition at the Vyner Street gallery in Shoreditch, London. These outlines of road maps are drawn with intentional ambiguity and spread across the paper like roots or veins. The 26 tiny moss patches represent the 24 houses and 2 hotels that have been occupied in one lifetime to date and are living landmarks, plotting a growing journey which began from birth in 1988.   

All four frames were interspersed through the other artist’s work, some in lower spaces, another tucked into a top corner of the room. This is all to mirror the seemingly random path which has been taken and the opportunistic nature in which moss grows. It has not been random, but a very specific series of environmental factors which have shaped this course.

Helen Chadwick

Chadwick’s work explores themes such as time and decay, gender and identity, and the erotic and the cerebral.

Anya Gallaccio, Turner Prize winner