Land. Ranger.

I have held a long and undiminished love for maps of all kinds. a cartographic lust.

all maps hold a certain charm. maps in the frontispieces of old hardback books. the london tube map with its electrical circuit-like flow. bus routes. maps of the world hung on classroom and office walls almost as you would a work of art. chromatic and static.

but my real love is for the maps that you can carry around. the maps in the glove compartments of cars, in the front pocket of your rucksack.

ordinance. survey. land. ranger.

I am always excited by the way maps unfold. space concertinas out of itself. 3D represented in 2D form, which with the creases and the folds are also three dimensional. it is an object you hold in your hand. an object you fold back on itself. an object that tells of other objects. turn the map upside-down as you try to work out where the hell you are. so, where the hell are we?

like most conventional illustrations or paintings, the drawn map conveys something that can be seen or could have been seen. But the painting gives you enough information so you are tricked into believing you are seeing the actual object, landscape or subject. The map is slightly different. It is made of essential information only. The landscape is a mess of lines, symbols and colour that the viewer must de-code to form a mental picture of the land surveyed.

the map and the landscape do not look like each other but the traveler would find a map easier to guide himself by than a typical painting or even a photograph of the same area. in reality there is too much information to be useful, the map must present only the needed data, but it does so at a cost.

the cost of this simplification is that it may tell you precisely where a church or public house is, it may show you the quickest or most economic route to take to arrive there but it does not tell you what the church is actually like, it does not qualify the public house in any way.
it reduces brick, coloured glass, lead, gold, wood that may have stood through centuries of upheaval, personal confessions, economic disaster and joyous family occasions to a square with a cross, a cross or two letters.

old maps are like old photographs that document what once was and is no longer. countries that no longer exist. countries that have been torn apart by war. borders that have shrunk. roads that have grown-up to be motorways. fields that are now roads. houses that no longer stand as the railway extension flattened them years ago. the way things were.

because the map does not give you all the information you are free to imagine how the land lays. who populates this area, what do they do, how do they live, work and function within this landscape. from the literal facts, the truth of what exists bends and bows under the weight of the fantasy that reigns with a free hand.


so, where the hell are we?

YOU ARE HERE.