Gareth Fuller is an artist and explorer. His work acts as a layered gaze into the identity of urban and rural places, transcribing their personal, geographical, and social meanings into what he calls ‘maps of the mind’. The results of these transcriptions are vast and intricate hand-drawn compositions – a series of visual portraits that express his personal and purposeful wanderings.
Unlike Boris Johnson, whose fate was to throw himself and the UK off a cliff, his hero Winston Churchill fell from a rickety bridge that crossed a steep ravine in Bournemouth as a child. The event is commemorated here by the symbol of his iconic Homburg style hat.
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.
In 2017, Beijing’s recycling system was known to be highly efficient, if controversial. Huge mounds of waste were sorted by people living on site, in small dwellings, amongst the decay.
