Dust Free Friends Special edition - Measuring the world

19 mm plywood, gold painted
50,5 × 27 × 239 cm
 
Hand-painted by Tom Emerson (6a architects)
 
2015
Limited edition of 3 pieces – sold out
 

“I have always loved maps whether real or fake, helpful or deceitful. The territory and human affairs brought together in lines and words. I especially like folded maps where fragments are arbitrarily framed, sometimes recognisable through a familiar coast like or river form and sometimes infinitely abstract when the folds isolate nothing but a piece of ocean like Lewis Carrol’s ocean chart at the beginning of The Hunting of Snark.

No single drawing in history has been as useful and misleading as the map of the world. Graphically it is as abstract and irregular as a Rorschach pattern yet recognizable the world over.

I thought it would be fun to paint a world map over a sheet of plywood only to cut it up later. Of course the oceans should be gold and reflective. It didn’t take long to realise my mistake. Water covers two thirds of the surface of the globe. An afternoon of painting in, cursing the expanse of the Indian ocean, I realized my task would take twice the time of the terrestrial version. But never mind. I am now much more familar with the complicated archipelagos of Greenland and the intricate islands of South East Asia I long to visit one day.

My favourite piece shows the curved Lake Baikal, the largest fresh water lake in the world in eastern Russia, about 3cm long, alone on an otherwise bare plywood rectangle.”

_ Tom Emerson