Stephen Walter is mapping the past, present and future

Stephen Walter guides the observer through images, featuring personalised signage and symbols. His maps are barometers of people’s present, past and futures, all delivered with clever amounts of wonderful British superciliousness.

Isle of Mort

Stephen Walter, London-based artist and illustrator, combines cartography, politics, social history and a wry look at everything in between.

Nova Utopia, Stephen Walter

Stephen Walter has taken pen to paper and mapped his fascination for discovery from the quark-sized to the galactic. And he’s mapped London – a lot. From the capital’s ruinous spaces to what lurks underneath its substrate; from its boroughs to its lost histories or rivers, tracking transport links through to historical features such as burial mounds; and to the whimsical narrations of life, love, politics and everything else.

Walter guides the observer through images, featuring personalised signage and symbols while weaving narratives. His maps are barometers of people’s present, past and futures, all delivered with clever amounts of wonderful British superciliousness.

Walter’s maps are barometers of people’s present, past and futures, all delivered with wonderful British superciliousness.

In his latest work – Brexitland – Walter explores our nation’s recent decision to leave the EU. The original now hangs in the prestigious Bodleian Library at Oxford University in their latest exhibitions on the world’s greatest maps. Never one to sit still, Walter has just returned from a mapping exercise in Ivory Coast, is about to map part of New York and recently even mapped Utopia.

What are maps about?

Maps are about geography and about desires of the people that make them. They are a projection between these two things.

Map of Comoé (detail 5), Stephen Walter

Maps are about geography and about desires of the people that make them. They are a projection between these two things

Are maps not, then, an inaccurate construct of what they depict? 

Accurate to what? The map is never the territory itself, only an edited version for a specific purpose. Unless it is a 1:1 map, it will always be a distortion, and what would be the point of a 1:1 map? Indeed such a notion is impossible. Also, a flat map and its projection cannot represent a 3D world or somewhere that exists on a globe.

Early maps were created as tools for navigation and exploration. I’m interested in the origins of things and anthropological developments in specific places. ‘Place’ is the substrate, or stage, upon which these understandings takes place. Maps are an edited version of a certain subject and always a condensed representation.

Early maps were created as tools for navigation and exploration. I’m interested in the origins of things and anthropological developments

What drew you to drawing maps?

It’s a strand of thinking that’s been with me since about the age of five. I’ve always thought about what’s around and the elements that make up the landscapes that surround me. I also think about how these elements and features can change. I remember drawing maps of new golf courses on existing land when I was about nine years of age.

Nova Utopia, Stephen Walter

I love how humans and their architecture, animals, nature and cultures build themselves up, and the understanding of these elements, into recognisable patterns. I guess that’s the framework I have in my brain when I start drawing. . . There’s always a back-story.

Maps are a way of mixing a lot of interests into one entity. I pick up things, file them away and then play with them. Making maps allows me to think about the great polymaths of the past, abstract paintings, symbolism and semiotics, political views, the news of that day, art history, social history. . .  Maps allow me to dovetail many of these interests into my work.

I love how humans, architecture, animals, nature and cultures build themselves up into recognisable patterns. That’s the framework I have in my brain when I draw

Where do you draw inspiration for your maps?

For me, it comes from exploration: an interaction with the landscape through walking. The act of discovery. A fascination with the world.

How do you decide where to map in London? 

My work in the past has been particular to the places where I have lived and experienced. I have lived in London most of my life. For example, I mapped Hackney Wick, where my studio is. From my explorations, I then started to collect things that interested me: images, imprints, ideas, signs and symbols. I would take these back to the studio and use them to create images and later maps of these places. I have recently been interested in building maps out from ideas rather than making maps out of the explorations.

Nova Utopia, Stephen Walter

You say you like ruins; what is it about them that attracts you?

I think some old buildings should be left as ruins; as playgrounds of the soul for the people, such as the Stanley Tobacco building in Liverpool. Of course, in an overpopulated land of acquisition and ownership that hasn’t got much of a chance. It could also be seen as indulgent. However, some ruins do remain. They become places and structures of intrigue that point to our past, weathered by the elements.

I am interested in the idea of the palimpsest – a document that is constantly being rubbed out and re-written. In the context of ‘landscape as a document’, these ruins form the lower and older layers of our history and are deemed in some way or other as important.

I think some old buildings should be left as ruins; as playgrounds of the soul for the people

Your recent work Brexitland has been a social commentary about current theme – why? 

Maps are always political. I’ve been following politics closely for years – it’s a passion of mine; it’s awful, I probably know more about political opinion than I do about art history. This map was a reaction to that. I had to do something about this huge issue of our time and after much deliberation, I came up with this.

You’ve just come back from a mapping exercise in Comoé, Ivory Coast?  

The Comoé National Park is a Biosphere Reserve [an environment selected in an intergovernmental scientific programme launched by UNESCO in 1971], UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest protected area in West Africa. I was invited to go out there by the management of the Comoé Research Centre and make a map of the park, this vast tropical savanna.

Map of Comoé (detail 2), Stephen Walter

The Ivory Coast is coming out of a civil war and there is increasing European funding for the park mainly from institutions in Switzerland and Germany.

It was such a random trip, especially in the rainy season, when the tsetse fly reigns, meaning I was mostly stuck in the laboratory of the station. It’s a vast and wild place near the Burkina Faso border, and super-hot outside: 38 degrees and the humidity was 90%.

I am interested in the idea of the palimpsest – a document that is constantly being rubbed out and re-written

What surprised you, if anything?

The physical fitness of the people out there in what you might generally describe as a poor rural community. I guess it makes sense when the nearest place to buy sweets or manufactured foods is a five-hour drive away! Some of the people out in this region still don’t deal with money, but barter and live off the land.

Life there is so abundant, you cut something down and within a year or two something has grown in its place: it’s so verdant. The recent high level of rain has become a problem, wrecking the roads and bridges. Climate change is hitting the communities hard. The elders have never seen such high levels.  Yam is now the main crop.

Nova Utopia, Stephen Walter

What will you work on next? 

I am working on a map of New York. I’m also thinking a lot about town-planning, transport links and green parts of London being linked up. And about the new lines north and south and where they will link for HS2 and 3. That’s an idea that keeps cropping up.

There is a strong possibility that UNESCO will purchase the Comoé map next year. Perhaps I can start making maps for them. That would be amazing.

What was the last thing you worked on? 

Leading up to the Brexitland map, I have been painting over and altering printed maps, exploring the idea of the breaking down and changing of place. Another continuing theme is making maps of Utopia and what that could mean; the future, now, and the past. The word was coined by Thomas More in 1516, as somewhere in between ‘a good place’ and a ‘no place’.


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