Curatorial notes · 5 min read
Curatorial notes: Tidal Cartographies.
On inventing an archipelago that does not exist and drawing twelve plates of it as if pulled from a 1920s admiralty chart.
Tidal Cartographies is the fifth aworldofart collection — twelve bathymetric and topographic charts of an invented archipelago, rendered in the visual language of 1920s Royal Navy admiralty surveys and pre-digital USGS quadrangles. The viewer reads each plate first as a chart, then realizes there is no such place. Indigo + bone palette; contour-line aesthetic, not satellite.
The collection is built around a single move: produce work that looks first like reference, second like art. A chart is a reference document. We made twelve of them, then named the places that don't exist.
The look
Each plate uses contour lines rather than satellite imagery, depth shading from #0B1E3F (deepest) to #C8D4DE (shelf), and contour line work in deep slate. The compass rose sits top-right; the plate stamp bottom-left. Place names — invented but credible — appear in a small serif at chart scale.
The archipelago and trench system is internally consistent: bathymetry from plate to plate is plausible, depth soundings work as a system, and the place-naming follows real cartographic conventions (a "throat" is a narrow tidal race, an "approach" is a navigational entry).
Reference set
- Royal Navy admiralty charts, 1880–1940
- USGS topographic quadrangles, pre-digital
- Erwin Raisz hand-drawn cartography
- Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City series
- Onkalo deep-time waste markers (for the patient hour)
Why no real places
Real coastlines have copyrights — admiralty chart layouts, USGS specifically — and they have buyer baggage. A buyer who lived in Maine looks at a real chart of Penobscot Bay and remembers a summer. The collection asks instead to be looked at without baggage. The invented archipelago means every viewer arrives unburdened.
A note on edition
The 36×48 cotton-rag tier on this collection is particularly suited to numbered edition: the plate reads as a single document, hung large, and the cotton substrate carries the chart-paper feel better than the other papers. We expect the numbered editions on Tidal Cartographies to close first.