Linking my own artistic vision to my professional work presents challenges, partly in working with the abstract concepts of policy work, which pays the bills, but finding client receptivity to the representation of concepts visually.
On a work visit to Toronto, I encountered a firm, Infonauts, which specialise in visual representation of data, on maps. I like this idea, as it brings together our own notions of time and space with powerful visual images that we can take in quickly.
In art, there is a tension between pure representation and abstraction. With maps, though, we are reminded that the terrain in not the map. Abstract visualisation helps us explore the maps of reality more thoroughly than just painting pretty pictures of vases.