Some paths have been walked so many times they hold the memory of every foot that passed. This project begins there, with ancient routes, with the people who mapped and retraced them across centuries, with the layers of human presence folded into familiar ground.
The Fabric of Maps is a long term body of work inspired by medieval maps. Not as historical documents but as devotional objects. Those early maps were never simply navigational. They held geography and belief together, encoding mystery and wonder into a single surface. They were made slowly, with intention, by hands that understood making as an act of faith.
That understanding runs through this work. Stitch is slow. It commits. Each mark made with thread is considered in a way that paint and print are not, and that tension between the freedom of one and the constraint of the other is where much of the energy of this practice lives. There is joy in the painted surface, its immediacy and accident. There is something else in the stitched one, closer to prayer, to repetition, to a kind of quiet devotion. Both are necessary, and what emerges from that push and pull is never quite what was planned.
Colour matters deeply here. Wassily Kandinsky believed that colour speaks directly to the inner life, beyond words. The medieval embroiderers knew it too, those deep reds, the gold, the lapis, colour chosen not for decoration but for meaning. This work reaches toward the same thing.
The New Forest is always present. Its coastlines, shifting light and layered histories are a constant source. A dye garden is growing here too, plants that will slowly yield their colour in the same way medieval makers once worked from the land. Alongside this, digital technology enters the work without apology, a digital embroidery machine translating hand drawn marks into stitch, the ancient and the new sitting alongside each other.
The Fabric of Maps will unfold over time, more like a path that reveals itself through the walking than a project with a fixed destination. What it holds, and where it leads, will become clearer in the making.
Rae Reynolds 