Artist Ed Fairburn continues to push his creative limits with these new map portraits. In the piece shown above, a Bristol street map has been carefully cut and drawn on, revealing the side of a woman's face. The map can turn into an envelope, which results in a combination of the map works Fairburn usually produces and a project he had previously worked on that involved postal art.
In another new work, Fairburn marries two previous techniques, as well. “With contoured maps I usually use a pencil to follow lines of elevation, altering the grade and pressure to change the tones,” he tells us. “With “Innsbruck” (below), I've instead highlighted the contours in ink, altering the thickness of each line to show the figure.”
