Artist Creates Intricate Portraits Out of Old Maps

Nikki Rosato's Two Bostons turns sliced-up maps into an intriguing human form.
Photo: Nikki Rosato

Artist Nikki Rosato creates intricate portraits by cutting away at old maps, leaving only the roads and rivers behind like a network of blood vessels. Rosato uses a Stanley knife to hand-cut away all of the landmasses between the roads and waterways, and then uses the delicate paper left to create portraits ? some in 2-D and some sculptural pieces.

For the sculptural pieces, such as a bust she created of herself, she creates a structure out of packing tape to act as a mold and then shapes the map around the head, using a gel to stiffen the material, supporting the overall frame with an internal structure of small wires. Larger pieces require a number of different maps glued together.

Rosato told Wired.co.uk: ?Through the removal of the land masses, the places almost become ambiguous, since all of the text is lost. Unless someone really knows the roads and highways, it is almost impossible to identify the place.?

She first started playing around with maps after finding a box of vintage maps in a used bookstore at a printmaking conference at Virginia Commonwealth University. She bought a few and took them home to experiment with, noticing how there was a parallel between the road lines and the lines that cover the human body.

?I was thinking of what it means to have a physical body and what it feels like when one is treated like one is just a body ? simply regarding the body as a structural casing,? Rosato said. ?I was breaking apart the body into lines, thinking about fingerprints, footprints, wrinkles, creases in the skin and how this relates to issues of identity. The surface of the human body is literally covered in lines, and these physical lines hold stories about our lives.?

For her first map series ? If You Were a Place, You?d Be ? ? she took photos of friends and asked them which place they felt best represented them or was important to them. She then used a map of that place to create a likeness of her subjects.

?By making portraits in this way, the map tactually becomes a delicate, skinlike structure,? she added. ?The map serves as a visual system mimicking skin or veins, etc., and it is a system that shapes identity. The map is a memory.?

Rosato noted that because paper maps are rarely used any more, they are easy for her to acquire. ?For my birthday this year, my mom surprised me with about 20 pounds of used road maps that she obtained from online sources such as eBay.?

More recently, Rosato ? who is studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ? has been using the cut-away maps as stencils to aid the creation of large-scale drawings. ?I?m hoping to create a narrative through the visual figural relationships that I lay out across the drawing paper ? touching on ideas of loss, abandonment, memory, identity and relationships,? she explained.

Make sure you check out Wired UK?s map-tastic gallery of Rosato?s work.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/MekKZ5hft_I/

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