maps

Maps can show places and much more: like the rocks below us; or weather patterns; or how the land dips and rises; or how many trees or people or houses or anything there are here or there; and amongst so many other things, we can trace lines of movement on maps. When I could move freely through the world, maps were a multifaceted tool and support, which among many other things helped to plan routes and to show me where (and where not) to go in work and play; showed me where I’d been, reminders of journeys and other good times; and let me visualise where and how people lived in times past. When I stopped being able to move freely through the world, maps also became aids to remind me of my old life, to visualise and help process my new, far more limited life, and to try and illustrate this new life for others.

On this old map of Edinburgh is stitched the route of every trip outside home I took in 2023. In green, the walking; in blue, the bus trips; in yellow, the car trips (not always me driving).

In February that year, after 3 years of managing chronic illness, I had a major illness crash, becoming mostly housebound and unable to carry on with even the part time work I had been holding down. It was a year of trying to work out the UK benefits system: applying for sickness benefits; applying, being refused, appealing and being refused again for disability benefits; applying for ill health retirement. I was sicker than I’d ever been. Being able so rarely to leave home felt incredibly restrictive and limited. I wanted this stitched map to illustrate how small and limited my world had become.

I wasn’t to know that the following year I’d become even sicker, and my world would become even smaller. In the year or more after finishing this map of 2023’s moving through the world, the only times I left home were for hospital appointments. A map of where I went in 2024 would show an even smaller world. 

A square map on a square brown kraft paper page in a handmade book. The map has some stitching and typed labels with text.
A thick handmade book lies on a wooden table.

My 100 days Scotland project in 2023, ‘100 places I’m glad I’ve been’, used maps and stitched lines as part of remembering and celebrating places I’d been and journeys I’d made through the world before I got ill. 

Onto this old map of the central Highlands of Scotland I stitched all my biggest mountain adventures in the few years up to early 2020 when my hill running and exploring were at their peak. Almost all of these were solo runs or hikes, through some of the wildest country left in Britain: few roads or houses or people; many tracks and paths and moors and mountains and valleys and lochs and rivers and non-human people. I always loved Strava mostly for the GPS maps it records, and being able to recreate my favourite journeys in my mind. This map is my analogue version to memorialise those journeys and experiences.  

A mixed media painting that’s also a map, showing the line of a walk L and I did from Kilmartin Glen over the hill towards the sea, to find the Ormaig Neolithic rock carvings. As we walked, I imagined that people may have walked a very similar route 6000 years ago, maybe to make or maybe to be with the same carvings. Painted into this piece are long grass stems I collected on the walk.