Last weekend I took the train up from Boston to Salem to teach a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum on connections between maps and biology as part of their participation in the Big Draw festival. The blurb for the workshop was:
Maps and geography surround us in our daily lives, but did you know that the growth of cities had anything in common with the growth of trees, or the cells in your body? In this workshop, we’ll use maps and geography as a starting point to explore the variety of fractal, biological imagery in our world through drawing. Emily Garfield is a professional artist who uses geographic imagery in her work but is just as inspired by the maplike imagery that exists in nature. She’ll present some of how she develops her new drawing projects, and we’ll use these techniques to explore how maps as a graphic format relate to other natural patterns like cells and trees.
Some of the slides from my presentation:
Some of my more biological map artworks
And some of the biological imagery that inspires them
Participants took the materials in different ways! It was a more drop-in event so some people came for a moment to draw something they liked, and others stayed for the whole 2-3 hours and really dug into the material and the maps they found in their minds.
