In My Double Life, Kiwis – and some international guests – share the side hustles, hobbies or dual careers that keep them busy. Here, artist Ruth Watson explains how making art – photography, video, sculpture and installations – led her to cartography (the science or practice of drawing maps). In 2004, Watson collaborated with the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics to create the largest map of the universe at that time; now her giant Other worlds sculptures can be seen at the Auckland Botanic Gardens.
I am more attracted to images of the world rather than anything to do with wayfinding - I actually have quite a poor sense of direction - but I’ve always been interested in how the world is represented. I found some old schoolbooks and I must have been about eight years old when I worked on a project where I copied an oval map of the world that has Antarctica at its centre. I got such a shock when I opened this book and saw this. I mean, who knows where, back then, I even found the map to copy?
I think when you come from Canterbury, you’re possibly more aware of Antarctica because expeditions left from Lyttelton and there are traces of those throughout the museums.
When I went to Antarctica [in 2011/12], it was part of a science-based course – I did a Postgraduate Diploma in Antarctic Studies at the University of Canterbury – and I’d like to say I was attracted to it because of the “heroic era” of the British exploration, but that’s not true.
Like many, I’d always wanted to go there. During the course, we learnt a lot about the Antarctic Treaty and its associated legal constructs, such as the Environmental Protection Protocol coming up for review in 2048. I ended up making a map painting with “2048″ as the title.
Of course it was amazing to go there and see remnants of the human history as well. I learnt more about that history after I returned and started reading books, such as The Worst Journey in the World.
For my research essay, I wrote about Edward Wilson, the artist who died with Scott on his Terra Nova expedition, and his ice crystal studies. I wanted to know how the drawings he made might have been related to discussions of science and art.
When did I know I was good at art? Well, other kids at school wanted to take my drawings home with them, but this was rural New Zealand in the 1960s, so the concept of being an artist really wasn’t on the cards.
At high school, we had to choose between Latin and art, so at that point it became a conscious choice, but I couldn’t imagine how to become an artist unless I went to an art school, so I enrolled in the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury.
The whole idea of working with maps started at art school in the 1980s, which was pretty early [in terms of the contemporary art world]. There were some artists in the United States and Europe in the post-war period using them consistently, but it was not the tsunami in contemporary art that’s developed over the past 30 years.
The art came first, with the hunt for interesting projections and ways of representing the world that were beyond a conventional view. I’m quite resistant to the way maps can be used in art, I believe, a bit unthinkingly as this kind of metaphor for an inner journey. I want to interrogate and challenge the representation of the world, especially given that Western cartography has a relationship with colonisation. When most people think of a world map, they see it with the northern hemisphere at the top and the global south kind of hidden away and under-represented. I felt a kind of responsibility to find out more, and that got me interested in the background and history of world maps.
Heart-shaped maps – the cordiform projections – were first conceived in 1514 and first drawn not long afterwards, with prints appearing in the decades that followed. I found them beautiful, but I soon realised that the literature on these things is quite partial or scant, so I ended up exploring them as part of my doctorate.
When I lived in Germany, I visited the German National Museum in Nuremburg, where they handed me a box from the archives. There I was rifling through this box because I was looking for a version of the Fool’s Cap Map of the World – it’s a fantastic piece – when I came across another map and thought, “What is this?” It turned out to be an uncoloured, rare cordiform map from the 1530s by Oronce Fine, who was a French cartographer and King Francis I’s royal mathematician.
They allowed me to take things out, put them on the floor and photograph them. That certainly wouldn’t happen now! I was awarded the international 2005 Ristow Prize in cartographic history for my study of Oronce Fine’s 1538 double cordiform map of the world, the first to use the term “Terra Australis Incognita”.
Making a map of the universe came about because I finished my PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. A lot of people said, “Don’t go, Canberra’s boring”, but the ANU was the best place to finish a PhD, and it ended up being life-changing because the whole place is set up for doing research.
I grew up in West Melton, Canterbury, and yes, it’s quite rural and you can see the stars, but I couldn’t claim to be a stargazer who grew up wanting to make maps of the universe. I made the map of the universe because the ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics was in a consortium of institutions involved with a Mapping the Universe project, and I was intrigued by it and thought art could make a contribution.
I took data collected by the astronomers and translated it into images, which were then printed onto hundreds of pieces of waterproof A4 paper. Between Light and Dark Matters was a 12-metre map, and you might think that each of the white dots on it are stars, but they’re actual galaxies with stars in each one. There are hundreds of millions of them. Looking at them all, it seems hard to think we could be unique in the universe.
I remember one of the scientists asked me why I wanted to make the map, saying, “What are you going to learn from looking at that?” When I’d made it, that same person came back to me and asked it I could make a smaller one that he could take to conferences. That was in 2004 and at the time, it was the largest map of the universe, but things have moved on since then (including the forms of mapping).
For Other worlds, I was looking for imagery that would be familiar in the sense that someone would look at them and know it was a representation of a globe, but also different enough to indicate that it wasn’t the world as we usually see it.
When I started working with maps at art school, I had no idea where it was all leading, but as far back as I remember, I always had an agglomeration of interests: history, archaeology, art and writing, so I’ve managed to bring them – well, most of them – together. I’m very fortunate and grateful that these activities are supported by working at Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts.
I really do see it as a dual life now. I’ve just come back from GeoCart 2024, which is a national cartographic conference, and I’ve been to International Conferences on the History of Cartography around the world.
There are quite a few cartographers in New Zealand. Why? Well, everybody needs maps and there are always new ways of looking, mapping and visualising our worlds.
Other worlds can be seen at the Auckland Botanic Gardens in Manurewa until Sunday, October 13.
