The Ceramic Map of Delft

Mappery has photos of the new Keramieken Kaart van Delft (Ceramic Map of Delft), a remarkable large ceramic mosaic map based on a 1672 map by Frederick de Wit that is mounted to a brick wall on a street in Delft, the Netherlands. Designed by artist Nan Deardorff-McClain, the map was supported by a crowdfunding campaign and built by around 500 local volunteers. The grand opening was to have been in March, but the pandemic intervened. More photos are available at the project’s Facebook and Instagram pages; a short video on the making of the map is below (and on YouTube). Coverage in the Algemeen Dagblad is in Dutch, as are most of the links.

Geological Mosaic Map

York Museum Gardens

The York Museum Gardens’ Geological Mosaic Map is a four-metre-square pebble mosaic that depicts the Yorkshire part of William Smith’s 1815 geological map of Great Britain—a copy of which is held at the adjacent Yorkshire Museum. The mosaic was commissioned in 2015 and created by mosaic artist Janette Ireland, who “used many imaginative devices—including fossils, both real and formed from pebbles, discarded stone from the minster and tiny millstones made of millstone grit—to represent the ideas which Smith was demonstrating in his map. […] The pebbles in the mosaic reflect the colours Smith used in his map, but genuine Yorkshire rocks are displayed in the flower beds on either side of the mosaic, alongside strips of the pebbles used to represent them.” Photo gallery. [WMS]