Wednesday, May 6, 2020
The Quarantine + Pandemic Survival Map: 'It's escapism, with a lot of humour'
No longer able to walk hundreds of miles to create his hand-drawn maps, the Beijing-based artist Fuller is charting his thoughts – and the global crisis – while stuck indoors
I’m interested in the psychology of a place and how it makes you feel. So I don’t really see myself as a map-maker – even though I draw maps. It’s about the process of travelling through a place to capture a sense of it. First, I walk for hundreds of miles and make all sorts of notes, and then take thousands of photos to use as triggers for my memory.
I walked more than 840 miles around Beijing when researching the map that became part of my Purposeful Wandering series. I circumnavigated the city and then walked around each ring road. Beijing (where I’ve lived for three years) is built on a Central Axis, and the map is, too. A lot of the drawing is literal, but I also built in personal experiences, references, visual puns and semiotics. Continue reading...