Map Making

THE HEREFORD MAPPA MUNDI c1300

​This 12th Century world map was exhibited at The Royal Academy of Arts in the late 1980s. In those days, students at the R.A. Schools, myself included, could go into the galleries before they opened to the public. It was an unofficial perk, a nod of permission from the staff - unbelievable, when you consider the insurance risks. Strange to think of the brash 1980s art world, true manifestation of Thatcher’s Britain, as more trusting in humanity than we are today, but perhaps this is just where we have arrived. 

A 'lunellum', half-moon blade for scraping flesh in the vellum making process.

I remember almost nothing about the exhibition which brought the map from Hereford to London, just the map, which fascinated me to the extent that I began to visit it each morning before starting to paint. What captured me was, what I saw as the map’s blatant double identity. It being both a map of world c1300 and simultaneously mapping, at least to my eyes, the interior of the human body. Observe the arterial seas and rivers, pigment faded to red-black stains, snaking through fleshy, golden land masses! Delightfully, the map is made of flesh, vellum, to be precise a whole calf’s skin, stretched, dried, scraped and pounced ready to take on the world. At the time, of these pilgrimages to The Mappa Mundi, I was working on large landscapes in oils, imagined worlds that played with coloured spaces, hinting at land, sea, and air. They had the illusion of vastness but also areas of detail that meant they could also read as minute worlds writ large. Little wonder that this Medieval artist’s rendition of microcosm and macrocosm stopped me in my tracks!

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The Red Seas detail MAPPA MUNDI

Crete and the labyrinth detail. MAPPA MUNDI

Sodom and Gomorrah MAPPA MUNDI

The map shows a flat earth with Jerusalem at its centre. Scenes from the Old Testament including the *Exodus, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel appear in surrounding lands. This Earth is made almost entirely of earth. The three, then known, continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa squeeze into its circle, with the Mediterranean being the only significant area of water shown. Shaped, a little confusingly, like modern drawings of Africa, this Mediterranean is full of islands mentioned in Greek myth. At the edge of the Earth the Columns of Hercules mark where it meets the Atlantic, a channel created when Hercules, smashed through Mount Atlas with ‘Nothing further beyond’ written on the pillars. In the farther reaches of his world, the mapmaker draws barbarians and beasts: the single-footed Sciapods, warlike and headless Blemmyes and the Cynocephali, men with the heads of dogs. 

I was lucky enough to use old maps from the collection at the Lancashire Archives in a mapmakers’ workshop, this summer. The event, brainchild of Dr Joanne Reardon of the Open University, invited a group of authors to draw maps of their stories as a means to find their way into starting a new project. In my role as drawing facilitator, I naturally showed them the Mappa Mundi. We talked about the extraordinary freedom of its contents, where myth, politics, faith, and geography co-mingle, unconstrained by the precision and realism of the maps we have today. The participants were encouraged to adopt something of this freedom, to forget the rules of genre, just for a moment, while they drew their maps.

Ever since this workshop that map has been back on my mind. I now see that the Mappa Mundi was a kind of personal talisman to my younger self, helping me to begin making my own worlds. Something in its accidental doubleness, its concurrent interior and exteriority, fired and still fires my imagination. My notebooks are now filling with new landscape compositions. Spaces occupied by symbols and creatures, so numerous that I have had to start a cartographic key to keep track. It is exciting to have new ideas forming. I move into my studio in the next six weeks, then mapmaking can recommence on a larger scale!

*Contemporary scholars consider the Mappa Mundi as an artefact made to honour Thomas de Cantilupe (1218-1282), former Bishop of Hereford and to support a campaign for his canonisation. Known for persuading King Edward I to expel any unconverted Jews from the Kingdom. After the 1290 edict of expulsion, Cantilupe was revered for his antisemitic vision. A closer look at the Exodus scene on the map reveals that Moses has horns, and his tribe are worshipping, not a golden calf but a demonic figure who squats on an altar shitting coins. Glad I did not know this back in the '80s!