A magnificent laser-cut wooden map of the street network of Norfolk VA hanging in a small elevator lobby in the Marriott Waterside hotel. It measures about 4 ft by 3ft and the depth of the wood casts some great shadows from the lobby light above. The detail is impressive when you get closer.

While we were in Mexico City we went to the Secretaría de Educación Público to see the amazing collection of murals by Diego Rivera. As we were leaving we stumbled on this massive mural map of Latin America

The scale of this stunning mural needs a longer range shot.

If you get to Mexico City, this is a “must see”

A range of images of the use of maps at John Glenn Columbus airport. The above a large compass rose inlay with the state map at its centre in the arrivals hall. Below, a street network formed from pieces of coloured laminate on a wall adorning the wall of a food court. The entire map was around 30ft long by 10ft tall.

Always consider the world when recycling…except eagle-eyed readers will notice a somewhat stylized version of a flat, projected map placed in a blue circle with some shadow effects to make it appear like a globe. Why didn’t they just use a globe?

And with apologies for the blurrycam, but this ladies earrings were magnificent. Spotted in the terminal, a large wooden mosaic of Africa as a hooped earring. Magnificent mappery!

Charles Kennelly sent us this impressive relief map from the Central Siberian Geology Museum.

“Incredible relief map of Russia, in one of the best geology museums I have been to. I especially liked the harsh clipping that leave water bodies pouring into the outside world. If you ever find yourself near Novosibirsk make the pilgrimage here.”

In the terminal building. Fills a wall. That’s all.

I met Anna Weber at the Danish GeoForum’s KortDage event.

She had asked delegates to bring with them a soil sample from their home region, she had over 40 samples from Denmark and as she was keen to tell me one from Sweden. She then made this Earth Map of Denmark.

Is it a map? I don’t know but it was beautiful and if a conference of 800 map geeks thought this was a worthwhile project to give space to, who am I to argue?

She explains the process in this short video clip

Update!

Anna sent me this additional info on her artwork:

Itinerant Cartography // Vandrende Kartografi, 2018
Artwork by Anna Weber Henriksen
Www.annaweberhenriksen.dk

With this landscape dialogue, images are extracted directly from the earth. 42 different sites from Denmark was connected at Kortdage 2018, and combined the sites created a new map and landscape-painting of the earth’s color and texture. The process here allows the composition of the land differently, moving cities and borders, and we can observe a new staging of the landscape, freed from its cadastral and economic value.

A starting point for this work is the artists interest in how mapping the globe with classifications, data collection and technological perfection affects the way we look and sense our surroundings. We all know the current mapping with socio-economic interests that always have a specific goal: where are the best agricultural land, where can the highway be located, where should the drinking water be protected, which building sites are the most expensive, where is the pollution worst, where does the refugees move? Everything can be mapped – both visible and invisible elements. But what about the earth in itself? Can it be mapped without the aim of a readable facit, classification or control-system?

The 42 sites, was collected by the participants at Kortdage 2018, and the work was a collective process unfolding throughout the geodata conference, as an open studio.

https://vimeo.com/301027974

A recent visit by Mark Iliffe and I to the Brewdog USA brewery found it to be teeming with maps. While we were still capable of operating a camera here’s some select pics. The map above is by Craig Fischer, Brewdog’s resident artist and simply shows the location of each of their breweries and pubs when painted in 2017.

And here’s another, occupying the floor in their new brewery ‘museum’. I mean, who doesn’t like gigantic maps!!!

You can even have your picture taken inside the Ohio map.

Or drink your favourite brew with a map of the state on your glass.

Cheers!

Today is GIS Day, so you get an extra bonus map in the wild thanks to Ross McDonald of Angus Council. Apparently they celebrated GIS Day with this scrumptious map cake.

For those not in the UK, the reference to Shetland in a box may be confusing. Recently the Scottish Government passed a law requiring map makers not to use the well established cartographic device of an inset map when representing the Shetland Islands, you can read more about this cartographic insanity here

One of mine

Been walking around Mexico City for 2 days and this is the first map on the streets that I’ve found. Not a great one but …

Watch out for more and better from my Mexico trip

Dave Lovell has an almost inexhaustible collection of map pics. I wish we’d have had these map collages in time for Remembrance Sunday (just past) but better a little late than not at all.

“Here’s a small series of (not very good) photos taken in Bramhall Methodist Church’s (wild!) remembrance exhibition ‘A Stillness Heard Around the World’ http://www.1914.org/news/bramhall-flower-festival/ The map collages represent the sentiment in the poem MCMXIV http://exhibits.lib.byu.edu/wwi/influence/MCMXIV.html looking back at a time before WWI.”