MAPPA MUNDI - ONLINE EXHIBITION OF RECENT MAP PAINTINGS
EMOTIONAL CARTOGRAPHY ON BORROWED PAPER
Best known for large-scale public works like Max the Virus, The Ark of Extinction, and SMOKINCAT, artist Marc Craig takes a more personal turn with his Map Paintings—a series that embraces freedom, improvisation, and introspection, stepping away from the bold, graphic style of his street practice.
Each work begins with a donated map—tourist charts, Ordnance Survey sheets, or forgotten prints, each carrying its own quiet history. These maps are not used to navigate geography, but as starting points for deeper exploration.
Through layering, distortion, and instinctive mark-making, the original landscapes often dissolve into something less literal and more internal: a visual record of the unconscious, shaped by memory, mood, and moment. The process draws on Jungian psychology and Craig’s lived experience with BPD, using art as a way to surface thoughts and emotions that resist easy articulation.
The resulting works are unapologetically honest—at times raw, at times playful, always rooted in the present. They hover between landscape and mindscape, embracing ambiguity and complexity over tidy meaning.
This ongoing body of work is about getting lost on purpose—peeling back layers of place to uncover something more reflective, more instinctive, and more human.