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

Moss Suitcase

This work was a development of Moss Trunk really. Moss is a loaded material not only for its aesthetic qualities but the things that moss conjures in the mind, of nature, carpeting woods and engulfing tree stumps or cities where it spreads in the shadows of back alleys around drains and other dank sources of moisture. I felt that with Moss Trunk the plant itself was quite literally too grounded. I wanted to make a piece which developed this sense of endless travel and thought of no better way to encompass this was to suspend the piece. With installation work you are asked to consider the piece in real-time and space so the fact that the piece itself was not grounded is integral to the work.

The piece itself was over a metre wide and isn't in fact a suitcase at all but was created using a large hand welded cage-like construction as the skeletal structure. The moss was all hand sewn to PVC covered mesh wire using garden wire then added to the outside of the structure. I removed the leather corners, locks and handle from an old suitcase and added them to the sculpture as an immediate familiar visual link. The inside was hollow to allow for the addition of fluid retaining liners or irrigation system for longer exhibition periods.

A work in progress...

Moss Trunk

This was an installation piece I did in a converted stall space in Brighton's Open Market. The show was titled 'Work In Progress'. This huge trunk was covered on the inside with moss which trailed up the wall and over the floor all the way to the drain. This was to suggest an uncertainty as to whether the moss was growing out of the trunk and into the drain or vise-versa. Not only does the nostalgic train trunk evoke thoughts of travel but the tiny mounds of moss themselves look like landscapes. I use moss as a material for it doesn't have roots in the same way as many other plants, is incredibly resilient in nature and in our cities resides in places such as alleys and other damp, dark dwellings. As a sculptural object alone with it's earthy smell and velvety texture I intended to create a pleasurable evocative piece which if left would continue to grow and given the right conditions could take over entirely.