Artist: Alex Perry

Artist Alex Perry is another artist I found who explores maps through artwork. This particular piece entitled, Weather Fronts, was displayed in the North House Gallery in London along with other artists with the same inspiration in common; maps. This piece by Perry explores the concept of map making through weather patterns. Perry uses screen printing, applique, and machine embroidery in her work. In this piece in particular Perry has screen printed an aerial image of a location. She then uses different embroideries on top of this image to display the particular weather patterns associated with this piece.

I really liked this piece because you can see the artists hand in the work. Whether Perry used a machine to embroider the images on this or not, the artwork looks very home made. Perry's style of map making sort of resembles a child's view of a map in the simplistic shapes and primary color palette however, a deeper meaning is embedded beneath this simple surface. I think this makes an interesting contrast. As I work on my final map project I realize that I am very interested in using paths to illustrate a narration of some sort. Perry's Weather Fronts may not be about narration but the type of mark making the embroidered patterns make insinuates some sort of narration to me that I want to follow. Are these weather patterns ominous? Do they represent calm weather? The fact that I do not know what these patterns mean generates a lot of curiosity about this piece for me. 

This piece really inspires me to think about different ways of representing paths and I realize I definitely want to include paths in my project that tell a narration without the viewer necessarily knowing what this story is through the representative lines. I want them to explore my piece and try to work through the images I present to them to come up with a conclusion.