Abstract

Exhibition at the National Glass Centre
The Map-i: Blue Marble project is developed from the solo exhibition Map-i: Mercator Revisited exhibition at the Mercator Museum in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium in 2013. Mercator Revisited was the first project to be developed as part of Map-i and explores mapping in glass in the context of the 500th anniversary of the eponymous cartographer’s birth. The investigation of Mercator’s life and work has allowed not only a reflection on the legacy of five hundred years of cartography, but also on an incredible period of human endeavour; the choice of glass was an apt metaphor as a window on the world. A notion of wonder which underpinned Mercator’s ambition for his Cosmographia: the ethos of Map-i is based on this premise of interconnectedness: how the observable universe can be broken down into infinitesimally small particles, applicable at both the micro and the macro level, always of course observed from a human point of view.