Because my family seldom throw things away, we still have a copy of the Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools from 1980. It shows a number of countries that no longer exist. Alongside the vast pink mass of the USSR, and hugging the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is Yugoslavia. Casting an eye north, there is Czechoslovakia. Germany is divided into two, with Berlin an isolated halved dot in the middle of the German Democratic Republic, surely an ironic name for the politics of that former Soviet state. Spain and Portugal were not yet members of what is now the European Union. Looking at old atlases is a salutary affair: so much can change in a generation.
Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach, two artists who have had a fascination with the shape of cities and mapping, are showing their work together for the first time at the Butler Gallery in an exhibition that opens during Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Prendergast began her City Drawings series in 1992. “I’m trying to put myself back to when I started,” she says from her London home. “In a way, all the work I have done since weaves in and out of ideas around it.”
Prendergast is endlessly fascinating. Earlier this year her From Abandon to Worry: An Emotional Gazetteer of North America, from 2003, was shown as part of Land, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In that work she had extracted placenames with an expressive resonance from US maps. There was a lot of lost hope and heartbreak.
READ MORE
Dublin born, Prendergast is adept at taking ideas that seem simple at their core, and weaving in astonishing depth. From Abandon to Worry tells the stories of early pioneers, echoes with the lost native names their journeys replaced and speaks to current anxieties on that continent.
When 90 of the City Drawings were shown at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Prendergast won the best young artist award for Ireland. “I had thought I would complete it, but then I realised it wouldn’t ever be possible,” she says. “It started when the USSR was dissolving, and all these ‘new’ countries were emerging. The Berlin Wall had fallen [in 1989], and that opened up a whole new order of things.”
Prendergast works from a combination of maps and intuition; her drawings follow the lines of rivers or mountains, picking out the underlying structure of each city in a kind of psychogeography that excludes all the layers of naming.
The internet wasn’t yet the resource it is today, so she gleaned her information from map shops and libraries. There are no princes, lords, martyrs or megalomaniacs commemorated in street names in her drawings. Instead the shapes emerge from a combination of landscape, lives lived and, in the gridded cities particularly, a strong chunk of civic ambition. “I’m a real city walker,” the artist says. “Walking, you feel the layers underneath. In London, within a 20-minute walk, you can feel the age of the city change.”
Favourites emerged through the project, one being Yaoundé, in Cameroon. “It is a set of wavy lines, and I felt that this was like how cities begin: somebody walks from here to there, and then that becomes a habit and a repetition.”
This is also the tragedy of cities, as, once set up, they become something to defend, and the idea of defending implies a threatening other, comprising pretty much everyone “outside” the settlement.
On the other hand, cities are also vital gathering places for new arrivals, offering space to find where, and who, you want to be.
Prendergast says her work is outside politics, but it can’t help but imply them. Her Black Map series, which blacked out everything save the bigger human settlements, can either be seen as a levelling erasure of borders and boundaries or, as we edge towards ecocatastrophe, a poem to our fragility.
Of course, when such an interesting artist follows an idea, it will always bring us to interesting places. Prendergast’s City project concluded at 113 drawings, deliberately unfinished. “It was a wonderful few years drawing them, but I stopped around 1995. There was a point when I realised that, if I added any more, it just became an exercise to complete.”
Fascinated by the legacies and politics of mapping, the Butler’s director, Anna O’Sullivan, came across the work of the British artist Chris Leach while visiting a different exhibition entirely.
Leach’s extraordinary series of miniature paintings of the 196 currently recognised capital cities began in 2012. From Abu Dhabi to Zagreb, his paintings zoom in on scenes gleaned from the internet. And, as with Prendergast’s drawings, the works are of a uniform size. Dublin occupies the same space as London, which in turn gets the same attention as Sana’a, in Yemen.
“I couldn’t get over the detail in these tiny pieces, and the breadth of the work,” O’Sullivan says. “I realised that showing it with Kathy’s drawings would, hopefully, prompt discussion around geography, architecture and politics: what cities say about us and what they don’t.”
As Brian Friel’s near-perfect play Translations shows, mapping and naming, while handy for getting where you want to go, are instruments of ownership and control. Translations was first performed in 1980, the same year as my Certificate Atlas for Irish Schools – although, unlike my atlas, it remains completely relevant.
Mapping imposes meaning: in the United States, the lands of the different Native American peoples flow under, around and through today’s federal boundaries. Look at maps of US states, and of the continent of Africa, and see the straight lines. When a straight line depicts a border on a map, you know it’s trouble. “Any border on a map is trouble,” Leach says.
It is fraught. In Prisoners of Geography, his 2015 book, Tim Marshall argues that global geopolitics are still driven by geography: by mountains, minerals and the need for deep sea harbours. On the other hand, Paul Richardson’s book Myths of Geography, from 2024, is equally cogent in claiming that it’s all constructed in pursuit of empire building.
Still, as Leach’s work shows, miniatures can put us in our place. All those grand boulevards, castles and palaces are made so small you could almost pop them in your mouth. Yet they exert a powerful pull. Peering in, you can easily get lost in these tiny worlds.
Aside from the astonishing talent and commitment to make the project, there is an underlying intent to Leach’s series that makes the work even more compelling since its completion. “It is a picture of the world,” he says, “but from a very specific viewpoint and point in time.”
The starting point was the aftermath of an exhibition the artist had held at Ballina Arts Centre, in Co Mayo, where he had painted all the capital cities on the equator, and those on the prime meridian, essentially mapping a “journey to the centre of the earth”.
Except it isn’t: the Greenwich meridian is an arbitrary construct of colonial mapping, as is our familiar Mercator view of the globe. Dating from 1569, the Mercator system distorts countries to lay them flat on a map, putting Europe firmly at the centre of everything.
The project took Leach almost a decade, and its early years encompassed some false starts. “I got information from the internet,” he says. “And sometimes I’d realise that Google was wrong, that I was painting the wrong place.”
It also involved an intensive look at some of our lived contradictions. “There are the Diomede islands in the Bering Strait. One is owned by America, the other by Russia, and they’re on either side of the International Date Line. So you can stand on one island looking across to the other and see someone who is in the day before.”
This, Leach agrees, comes from our very human need to impose an understandable narrative on our lives, marking out experience in both time and distance. Nonetheless, it all stands or falls on the stories we’re able to tell ourselves through language – which have been proved, over and over, to be essentially inaccurate.
“That is intrinsic to the project,” Leach says. “There are 196 countries, 196 capital cities, and they’re all arbitrary, because we’re all part of the world. If I can do one thing, it would be to put forward a picture of humanity, and have people empathise with the greater context of things.
“I mean, from a political perspective, you would imagine that this all has to change at some point in the future. You have to stop looking at nationality as a basis of our own personal journey, infrastructure and story.
“And yet,” he adds, “nationality is family, and family is close. Family is heartfelt.”
Together, Prendergast and Leach’s work lay out these ideas and feelings in ways that open up new avenues of thought. Added to this is the permanence of art, versus the seeming immutability of capital cities as seats of power, turned on its head. It is wrenching to see Kyiv and Beirut. The island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not be habitable in a generation, their capitals, Tarawa and Funafuti, lost to rising sea levels. Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta to Borneo, as Jakarta itself is sinking.
One missing city from Prendergast’s series is Dublin. “I did try and draw Dublin quite a lot, but I just knew it too well,” she says. “Then, actually, this morning I was thinking, I wonder if maybe I should just draw it now.”
Cities of the World: Kathy Prendergast & Chris Leach is at the Butler Gallery from Saturday, August 9th, until Sunday, October 26th. Kilkenny Arts Festival presents a panel discussion hosted by Valerie Mulvin, Cities of the World: Productive Disorder, on Sunday, August 10th, and an artists’ talk with Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach on Tuesday, August 12th
