Making maps since 2001.
Molly is a visual artist, map-maker and teaching artist. She creates custom maps and ‘geographic expressions’ for a wide variety of individuals and organizations. She also runs map-making workshops and art programs around New England. Molly has a PhD in Geography and has traveled all around the world making art.
MollyMaps combines cartographic design and landscape art to create unique visual expressions of geography.
Press:
Molly’s Artist Statement
I combine elements of cartographic design, semiotics and landscape painting to create fresh visual expressions of place. I work in many mediums, and in each I seek to encounter the necessary, yet problematic challenges of representing place as both a phenomenological experience and a specific, geographic feature. A sense of place that is simultaneously personal and planetary - one informed by our bodily senses as well as our geographic imagination.
By playing with our conventional uses of scale, perspective, symbology, color and line, I try to distill our complex relationship to place and to planet. My artwork is informed by my graduate research in cartographic theory, climate change communication, and non-western mapping traditions.
Got the guts up to finally give a Ted Talk! I discuss the importance of miniature map-making as a way of connecting to the places you love. No artistic skills necessary. Nov. 2022
Places and Spaces TV Show
This show is about Sunday River and features a commissioned painting I did for them. I discuss my intentions and process for this kind of project. Go to minute 7 - 10 for my piece! Jan. 2022
DownEast Magazine Article
Wonderfully written and photographed piece! January 2021
Interview by Ben Cosgrove
Fun, long winded chat between friendly, passionate topophiliacs. June 2018
More…
We all deserve ways to celebrate our connection to place. But our culture offers few options. Mapping has become an automated service to get us where we want to go-- faster, without delays, without hassle. We have forgotten that maps have always been, and need to be, so much more than navigation tools.
Maps can offer authentic, personal orientation. Maps can ground our hearts as well as our minds. They are a surface of human meaning. They orient our lived experience within the vastness of our imagined worldview. We need maps that express what places matter to us, what is happening to the planet around us, and how we feel about all of that. Maps that are expressive, alive, imperfect-- because they were made with the passion of the human hand.
The mission of MollyMaps is to better understand our place on a dynamic planet through map-making and creative geographic expression. This work involves commissions, exhibits, public art works, community mapping projects, K-12 art education projects, and all-ages workshops.
