Textile Maps

Map art is one of my favorite things. I'm always gathering examples. I define it broadly to include any art map with maps, or of maps, artistic cartography, and the art of what is mappable. Today, I'm sharing a subset of what I've found: the maps made with textiles (especially map quilts and embroidery).

Haptic Lab, Great Lakes quilt

Haptic Lab, Paris quilt

Haptic Lab makea variety of wonderful quilt maps and kits so you can make your own. I think of the Great Lakes as home (though as a Canadian, I think they are missing the boat by only annotating the American side).

They've also made some lovely city map quilts and kits, including the ones for Paris and Boston, shown.



Former urban planner, Kathryn Clark made a series of 'foreclosure quilts' depicting bird's eye views of neighbourhoods with the foreclosed properties marked. She writes, "It was important to me to present the whole story in a way that would captivate people’s attention and make a memorable statement. Making map quilts seemed an ironic solution. Quilts act as a functional memory, an historical record of difficult times.  It is during times of hardship that people have traditionally made quilts, often resorting to scraps of cloth when so poor they could not afford to waste a single thread of fabric."

Kathryn Clark, Detroit Foreclosure Quilt, 22" x 44" Cheesecloth, linen, cotton and quilting thread.

Kathryn Clark, Cleveland Foreclosure Quilt, 2011. 25" x 60" Cotton, linen, recycled denim and embroidery thread. 

Kahryn Clark, Chicago Foreclosure Quilt, 2013. 31" x 42" Linen, cotton and embroidery thread.

Leah Evans uses appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, natural and synthetic dyeing, needle-felting, hand printing, and a variety of embroidery stitches to make her quilts, based on aerial photography, maps, and satellite imagery, though they may not be consciously based on specific places. The results are organic and beautiful.

Leah Evans, Estuary

Leah Evans, Development

Leah Evans, Isthmus Nocturn

Leah Evans, Tundra

See also Ian Hundley and his fabric map quilts.

Ian Hundley and his fabric map quilts

As described previously, Steele and Tomczak created Street of Heaven, a stitched, embroidered map of Toronto and specifically, Yonge STreet for STITCHES.

 

Steele and Tomczak, Street of Heaven

 

Other amazing examples I've found of embroidered maps include:

 

IÑIY SANCHEZ’S SUSTAINABLE EARTH SWEATER

Nicola Searle, Memory map of a route in my hometown, St. Albans.

Heidi Weiss
Flood Map (October 19-23, 2009), cotton thread on linen. 7" x 11"

Embroidered Buenos Aires map for travel guide cover. By Rita Smirna.

Embroidering STITCHES

IMBLANKY by RAD on the left and Cloud Brocade by Philip Beesley on the right

I did not have an opportunity to post last month, but there were a number of interesting exhibits in Toronto, thanks to TODO the Toronto Design Offsite festival (part of the IDS). The premise of ‘STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward’ fascinated me. The show was at the Toronto experimental design centre and gallery, WORKshop, below ground and adjacent to Bay subway station. It promised to use the exquisite traditional craftsmanship of silk embroidery from China, as a sort of jumping off point for contemporary Canadian designers, architects, inventors and artists to riff on theme of embroidery. The show included seven hand-crafted embroidery pieces from the Zhou XueQing Embroidery Art Center in Guangdong, China, depicting luminous natural scenes with birds, flowers and landscapes in subtle, iridescent silk threads, some as fine as hair. They even provided magnifying glasses to really see the incredible detail.





The contemporary response played on the idea of embroidery. Eric Boyd from Hack Lab combined machine embroidery with a pretty (yes, pretty!) open source microcontroller called LilyPad Arduino, which was designed for ‘wearable’ applications, sewed to fabric employing electrically conductive thread. This allowed him to have changing patterns of flashing LED sequins. The Responsive Architecture at Daniels RAD team showed IMBLANKY, which appeared to be a green taffeta blanket with a modern, stylized pattern of bronze flowers. On closer inspection, each ‘flower’ is a tilt sensor made of conductive fabric, with the pattern of ‘stems’ actually acting as a circuit. Projected onto the wall was a demonstration of the blanket’s ‘sense’ of its own position: a short film showed a person moving the blanket and the simultaneous computer model produced from its data of its own 3D shape. Suspended from the ceiling was architect Philip Beesley’s Cloud Brocade, a ‘geotextile’. This is a strange and beautiful sculpture, like those of his you may have seen at Luminata or Nuit Blanche. A delicate net of airy, white, plastic flowers, hide hypodermic needles, through which they might inhale useful chemicals from the environment and collect them in tiny bulbs. He imagines a future where microprocessors and sensors embedded in art and architecture can play a role interactively in our environment – without ever forgetting aesthetics and design. Specific Objects Inc. and Steele and Tomczak each employed digital machine embroidery to mimic the detail of the Suzhou pieces in portraying the glacial formation of Moraine and all 58 km of Yonge St. in Street of Heaven, respectively. Williamson Chong Architects decided to add further dimensions to embroidery, presenting 3D printed art objects and a holographic projection, along with 2D prints.


Circuit Stitching (front and back) by Eric Boyd, Hack Lab


Moraine by Specific Objects Inc.



Street of Heaven by Steele and Tomczak


Stitches: Interstices by Williamson Chong Architects

I’ve always had great respect for needlework and the Chinese pieces are truly exquisite. I love how broadly the theme has been interpreted by those working in contemporary and perhaps even futuristic media. Imagine how both the ancient and the boundary-pushing, interactive contemporary designs could play in our own homes!