Maps in Clay! (Who Knew?)

I’ve never been one for molding things out of clay. After all, I AM her majesty. (Plus, I once took a pottery class and let’s just say things came out somewhat bumpy and lumpy… which made me grumpy.) But I am definitely pro-looking-at-people’s-work-who-are- sculpturally-inclined. And combine that with something about maps, and I’m there!

This past weekend I checked out another Baltimore Festival of Maps exhibition, Terra Incognita at Baltimore Clayworks. Rebecca Harvey, the awesomely mappy curator of the exhibit, wrote in something I saw “ I am interested in looking at the work of these artists in terms of mapping, in expanding the definition to include the abstraction of form and meaning, in a stripping away to uncover meaning. Can a map be a line, a pattern, a series of objects? How do we map the unknown? ” A woman after my own heart!

The exhibit has a little bit of everything, from colorful vases to circles filled with red clay (you know, like dirt) to shiny dinosaurs with their heads in the clouds. Very, very cool. Check out the exhibit for yourself at Clayworks’ online gallery. (You really should come to Baltimore for all this, my friends. You think I’m just going to keep filling you in on all the mappiness going on here. Well… maybe.)