'The starting point for this print was Thomas More's Utopia. Utopia is a pun on the Greek ou topos meaning 'no place'. I was playing with the idea of there being no Heaven. People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn't work like that - it's a continuum' —Grayson Perry
As both human body and globe, Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere lays out the key concepts and concerns of contemporary western life. Perry based his composition on the Ebstorf Map, destroyed during the Second World War, in which Jesus was shown as the body of the world, with his head, hands and feet marking four equidistant points around the circle. In Map of Nowhere, Perry places his own image at the work’s apex, presenting its contents as a form of self-portrait. Exploring his own belief system, the artist presents his opinions contending with those he finds crowding around him in wider society.
From jibes about current affairs, to touchstones of his personal life, Perry’s map is an articulate and elegantly rendered satire. In the centre of the image Perry writes ‘Doubt’, he says, ‘because a philosopher once said, “Doubt is the essence of civilization.’’ A skeletal child contains bigotries: racism, sexism, ageism and suppressed rage all branch from a stomach labelled ‘fear’. The artist’s alter-ego Clare gets a sainthood, while people pray at the churches of global corporations: Microsoft, Starbucks, and Tesco. The ‘free-market-economy’ floats untethered, pre-empting a global financial crisis to follow in 2008. The landscape below is host to a pilgrimage, showing figures in religious garb following a route that culminates at a monastery basking in a beam of light excreted by the artist.
