Gay map of Sydney
Gay map of Sydney, 2019
Jeremy Smith
black and white ink on paper
PXD 1572/Folder 2
JEREMY: I was actually at work at MCA and I had done a sort of scribble on the back of my clipboard while I was at work, and the drawing was an idea I had of projecting an image of Sydney, based on my personal experience, as a gay millennial in the city. The idea that, you know, everyone has a personal map of the city. They all have personal stories, there are different levels to the city.
So in my research, I did a lot of research on Mappa Mundis, which is Latin for "map of everything". And they're medieval maps that would actually have Jerusalem at the centre. The north would actually be east, and there'd be a map of everything, the whole world, as was known at the time by the cartographers.
And this map was not a geographic map. It was not intended to get from point A to B. It was almost a psychological, spiritual, metaphysical map of the whole world. So you'd have, drawings of monsters and creatures on the edge of the map. You'd have images of religious iconography within the work.
And I thought that really spoke to the idea of what maps can actually be, apart from being locational tools, they can actually be narratives and poetically expressing aspects of our world, and map makers are like narrators. And so it's this idea that no map can tell all truth, because every map is selective in what it includes and what it leaves out.
And in particular, I've wanted to create artworks that can tell a story very quickly.
And so by using just phrases or words, linked visually to places, you can tell a very broad story with very few words.
Within the gay community stereotypes play a very big role in quick categorisation.
There's an idea of, sub-communities.
There's also the idea of, you know, winking knowledge that there are certain things that are presumed or within the community, are sort of commonly known. Whether or not that they're individually accurate, they sometimes often have an element of truth to them, which can be confronting.
A lot of the words, I think I've picked up in my life. A lot of the areas came personally from me hooking up with people through Grindr. There are areas of Sydney I have never been to, (LAUGHS) and I am purely projecting. But I've lived in the city my whole life.
My family's lived here for three generations, so I know the city fairly well. But again, a lot of it was created with the intention of being humorous. But I think that humour often can hide greater truths, and it's easier to access a great truth through humour than potentially, political manifesto or being more direct.
Map makers are narrators