My name is Julian Aveling and I am the artist. I was born in Southern California, between the Transverse Ranges. When traveling, I always longed for California's wild diversity of land and people, with mountains jutting out of deserts next to craggy coasts. I am immensely grateful to now be living and work in the San Francisco bay area, with a studio in Berkeley.
I have been fascinated with maps since I was a toddler. When my mom read me books, I would hyperfixate on the maps that were often in the preface. When I was a teenager, I would spend hours drawing fantasy maps and thinking about how the water and the mountains and the land affected the communities that I imagined to live in them.
In undergrad, I took an advanced geographic information system statistics class that taught me to use modern map-making software. I shortly used those skills with my college's very-expensive laser cutter to start making pieces about the real world, which combined my interest in maps and ecology and ekistics with my desire to do tangible work with my hands.
The maps I create are touchable and textured and quite durable so you can hold them up to your eyes and put yourself in the shoes of their inhabitants.
Cartography is deeply, inherently subjective: from the obvious choices about what to focus the map on to the visual composition of the map to the type of mathematical transformation used to turn an ellipsoid Earth into a rectangular model to the inputs into the contour algorithm to create layered elevation. As such, I hope my art can not only illustrate how mountains, rivers, forests, valleys, deserts, oceans, tectonic plates, ecosystems, and fault lines intersect and affect homes, roads, and borders; but also to tell compelling visual stories using geographic data, about socioeconomic disparities, segregation, ideas of human 'ownership' over land, historical events, and environmental destruction and protection.