Here’s something I’ve been waiting to find the time to make it for many years. A brand new Money Map of London. It’s a homage to my adopted home town, in all its glory and contradictions, its’ amazingly colourful and and diverse culture, old but ever changing. Landscapes of London creates fantastical kaleidoscope of contrasting imagery hand drawn, painted and and collaged with international banknotes.
Landscapes of London is a hand drawn and painted map showing the capital city and its surrounding counties, with each of the 32 Boroughs depicted in a different hand cut, uncirculated, current issue banknotes. It’s a homage to my adopted home town, in all its glory and contradictions, its’ amazingly colourful and and diverse culture, old but ever changing.
In my studio I spend a lot of time looking at banknotes under a magnifying lense (so I can see where I am cutting), so as I am working I come across the most amazingly diverse images of people and places. As with with all my Money Maps, I use this imagery to describe a little of the stories of their country of origin, via a landscape, a building, cultural figure, plant or animal. As well as looking extensively at the imagery on the banknotes, I was also looking at the overall map design and took inspiration from a host of historical maps including 16th Century Florentine world maps and 17th and 19th Century British regional maps.
All combined, Landscapes of London creates fantastical kaleidoscope of contrasting imagery, ranging from mountain ranges to a museum of Human Rights, ancient mosques and temples, parliament buildings to a Ukrainian village. A 14th century Sufi poet resides in Enfield, and a 19th Century Suffragete in Bexley. As for local wild life, wild horses run in Kensington and Chelsea and a herd of elephants roam in Richmond, Dragons Blood trees grow in the London Borough of Wandsworth, Date Palms in Brent. London is a place where, for century upon century, people from across the UK and the world over have come to live, to work and build their dreams. This map is a visual history of people and places that make the landscape of the city today.
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