Installation artist Luke Jerram’s past work includes large reproductions of the Earth, Moon, Sun and Mars. His latest is Mirror Moon, a touchable stainless steel globe of the Moon created with NASA topographic data.
A one-metre version of Mirror Moon debuted at the Royal Society last year. A larger, two-metre version is coming to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich next March to mark its 350th anniversary. Jerram discusses the project here.
Sonia E. Barrett’s Dreading the Map is an explicitly anti-colonial work installed in the heart of one aspect of British colonialism: the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society.
Using carefully curated paper maps of the Caribbean and UK that have been shredded into strips, the artist and several black women co-creators used African-Caribbean hair styling techniques to plait the shredded maps. Culturally, such female spaces of hair styling are filled with discussions around self- and community-care, and this black woman-centred cultural practice juxtaposed the wood-lined walls, globes and portraits of white explorers that typify the building with the music and laughter of black women talking and working together. As a response to the RGS’s stated desire to reflect on their history and their building, this was a filling of the space with black women’s language, perspectives and practices, a reimagining of what the space can and should mean.
Dreading the Map is one of several “artistic provocations” commissioned by CARIUK. It has been installed in the RGS’s Map Room since March. On 24 May the RGS hosted a conversation with Sonia E. Barrett about the work.
The Chiswick Timeline, a public mural of historic maps of Chiswick, London, situated along the walls of the underpass next to the Turnham Green tube station, opened earlier this month. A project of Abundance London, the mural is a series of panels reproducing maps of Chiswick from as early as the late 16th century, and traces its development into the London suburb it is today. An accompanying fold-out book is also available. [Londonist]
