Crowdsourced Continents: The World

For the past few years, I've been going to events in London asking people to draw maps of continents.

I went to a Latin American festival, Canada Day and USA Independence Day events, a UK / Australia cricket match, a European folk music festival, an African Craft Fair and a variety of Asian events.

At each, I asked people at the event to draw a map of that event's continent. Some people came from the continent, some from elsewhere.

I then took all these maps and laid them on top of each other to create a jumbly mind-memory-map of these continents. And here are all those maps, as the world.

Some were clear - Africa, Australia, South America - and some much less so - Europe and Asia.

In all, we can see that maps are made by drawing, constructs in the moment, made from memory which is patchy and personal, familiar and fascinating.

I've had really interesting conversations with the 87 people who drew these maps, and hopefully, you enjoy them too.

Africa, sketch maps

I've resumed collecting crowd-sourced* 'multi-maps'.

*when I first started asking people to draw maps, crowd-sourcing wasn't a popular term but it is now and works well.

Previously, I've collected maps of North America, South America, Australia, South East Asia and Europe.

This time, I looked for maps of Africa.

I went to an African Market in Spitalfields to ask stallholders, shoppers and spectators to draw Africa.

I asked twelve people to draw Africa. I've overlaid these maps on top of each other. This is the result.

Above Africa

A year ago today, I flew to Rio de Janeiro. At the time, I didn't share these aerial photographs taken as we flew above Africa.

I've never been to Africa, so it was a wonderful sight for me to see the desert dunes and mountains and valleys stretching away for miles and miles.

I was excited too to see structures - houses and maybe a mine? - in the middle of the desert.

Later, we flew over some coastal towns and cities including Agadir and Guelmin.

Mountains in the south of Morocco.

Valley in south of Morocco.

More Moroccan mountains

Agadir from above

Guelmin from above

River and meander to the south of Guelmin.

My next task is to see if I can work out where these are exactly. Africa is a big place, and most of the flight-tracker sites show London - Rio flights not actually flying over it, so it might be a tricky task. Updated with locations on 2/01/2014.

Country + Continent Cards

I've been making a lot of cards recently from maps and recycled paper - take a look at some below - showing map shapes of countries and continents.

I love how recognisable some countries and continents are, simply by their shape. But I also wonder why some countries are not?

Next Saturday morning, I will be selling these cards - and my Christmas and Valentine map cards - and notebooks at a table top sale at The Dog House pub in Kennington.

The sale is in aid of people who have haemochromatosis, so do come along and say hello.

Map tattoos: geography on the body

When I was in university, a friend of mine wrote a great geography dissertation about tattoos. She imagined the body as a landscape, with tattoos acting as landmarks and inscriptions in the landscape. People wrote their lives on to their skin, tattoos are like maps to their identities.



I really liked the idea. I wondered if people would mark their patriotism on their bodies, with maps or national insignia as tattoos.




For years, I've wanted to do a photography project on it, but have always stalled at the idea of finding people to photograph. Recently, I started to explore on flickr, finding these fantastic images.



I find it amazing, fascinating and inspiring that people's pride and patriotism lead them to the extent of imprinting maps of their country, state, city onto their skin.



I've created two galleries of these images on flickr: Tattoo Nation I and Tattoo Nation II

(Thanks to flickr users who have given me permission to show their images.)