Of ox bow lakes, GIS, sailing, lockdowns & IG art challenges

There were so many places I could start with this more personal journey, but I decided to create a very simple collage map showing how I got to where I am - making hand-made art maps

Hello, dear reader

Thank you for joining me for this first foray into personal maps and story telling. In preparation for this journey, I made an actual, physical atlas to hold my maps from a single piece of A2 card. You can see a bit of behind the scenes in this video.

So, this letter is divided into three parts:

1. The personal map and story

2. Mapping your own journey

3. The fun part - get involved

One of the serendipitous consequences of my new Substack offerings is that I get to write fiction to my hearts content and write about parts of my life for my personal atlas. I’d not really thought about it like this, until I sat down to write this narrative for my first personal map. It dawned on me that I was really happy about it. Subconsciously a plan came together.

There were so many places I could have started with this journey, but after a little thought, I came up with the idea to create a very simple collage map showing how I got to where I am - making hand-made art maps. Unlike writing, which I have done since I was an angsty teenager, making art is a relatively new thing for me, and making art maps even newer.

So let’s back track a little and see how it all came about.

Follow the story along with the map. Start at the top left corner and follow the black trail.

“Finding my way to maps” ©Deb.Aura.Art 2023

Once upon a time, there was a young girl called Debbie (or Deborah when she was in trouble with her family!) who loved the mapwork aspect of geography at school - the bits about drawing painstaking cross sections, working with scale and measuring distances, deciphering symbols and keys, locating places with grid references and more. She also enjoyed learning how about features of the Earth were formed, like ox box lakes and mountain ranges. However, apart from passing an “O” Level in the subject, she sadly never thought about these things again.

She did wonder why she was such a good navigator when she and her ex sailed in her late twenties and early thirties. Aah, the map connection via delightfully large and intensely detailed nautical charts - working out tides, plotting courses, identifying way markers. In fact, the navigation bit was the only bit she enjoyed about sailing, as she never really found her sea legs.

Anyway. One day in 2003 (now aged 39), she found herself part of a team putting together an educational Geographical Information System (GIS) for high schools in South Africa. She re-discovered her love of maps, even if they were digital. Doing a cross section was so much simpler on a GIS! This endeavour kept her busy for 7 years or so. Then, once again, maps disappeared from her life, apart from the occasional need to use a paper or phone-based map to navigate.

Many years later, along with the rest of the world in 2020/21, Debbie now unemployed during COVID lockdowns, desperately needed something to keep her sane and occupied. So like many others, she took up art - something she had no training in. She began to play, to explore and voraciously learn from others (thank goodness for the internet!). In June and July of 2021, she found herself participating in a 61-day art challenge on Instagram, making one piece of art on a 4” x 6” index card each day. A large proportion of those pieces she created were maps. Fabulous, fictional, fantasy maps came out of nowhere, miraculously being channelled through this new art and creative practice.

Surprisingly, the daily art routine established during the pandemic endured even when she returned to full time work again. When the same challenge rolled around in the summer of 2023, she was right in there, with a 61-day map project called Adumbrations¹. Yup 61 days of creating one art map a day on an index card. Some of these by the way are the basis for both journeys we are now exploring on her Substack.

A related nudge came from her niece, who said to her one day sometime in the summer of 2023: “You should do something with these maps, Debsy”. And so Mappery: Not just for Navigation was born in September 2023, combining her love for writing and telling stories with a new found love of making art maps.

And so, here she is. On the cusp of something uncertain yet immensely exciting.

A Day With - free zine

Did you download, print and make the free zine? If not, you can grab it here.

• If you did, head to the comments or reply to the email letting me know who you spent the day with and how it went!

• If you haven’t yet, are you planning to?

Mapping a path to “How I Got Here”

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. [Steve Jobs]

One of most satisfying and fun ways to connect the dots looking backwards is by mapping a “how I got here” journey. They can be used to record only the most key life events, or any other smaller journey you have made.

The map in this letter is one of those, mapping all the way from my childhood to the current day. I find that it helps me to remember parts of my life that I think I’ve forgotten and make sense of them.

What could you map from your own life? Reply to the email or head to the comments below.

This is the fun part where you get involved in my personal atlas. It’s time for you to decide what map I create and write about next. As this is the first time we as a collective are choosing the next map for this journey, I am leaving the voting open to all subscribers (both free and paid).

Have a look at the two options below:

1. Option One - I document one of my regular commutes or journeys

2. Option Two - I use the downloadable zine to record my own “Day With …”

3. Vote in the poll to let me know which map type of map you’d like me to create and write about in the next issue

Vote below ⏬

Well, that’s it cartophiles! I’ll be welcoming you back into this space in two weeks time. I can’t wait to see which map you’ll choose for me to create and write about.

By sharing this letter and by referring friends you’ll receive special benefits such as complementary paid subscriptions.

Other maps and stories in this series

Head to the Index Page for all the stories so far. All stories will be free to all subscribers to read, whilst paid subscribers will have the opportunity to shape and influence the direction this journey takes.

1. A rough or symbolic representation of something