
Gareth Fuller is an artist and explorer. He walks hundreds of miles to create vast, hand-drawn portraits of place. From London and Beijing to Pyongyang and Washington, D.C., his work reveals stories and identities of landscapes, capturing their personal, geographical, and social essence in what he calls ‘maps of the mind.’

The first North Korean female pilot is depicted flying through the air. I was told she had dinner with Kim Il Sung in a hidden bunker, inside a wooded valley. Legend has it that black dragons also once lived in the valley, and that they danced in the white clouds.

Marylander Peter Carnes pioneered U.S. ballooning in 1784 near Bladensburg; after a failed first attempt, his second flight carried a 13-year-old boy—America’s first aerial passenger.

A local nickname for Washington’s elite, the “cave dwellers” were members of wealthy, influential families who had lived in the capital for multiple generations. Seldom seen and mostly known only to each other, the cave dwellers came to prominence in the roaring ‘20s for their exclusive high-society gatherings.