Hormazd Narielwalla at the Royal Geographical Society: ‘I fell in love with maps from the 1500s’

Founded in 1830, at a time when the world was full of mystery, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was born out of a colonial-era desire to uncover the secrets of the globe. Its objectives were to gather information about places near and far and to form a library that would support travellers into the unknown. Today, the institution, based in a red-brick villa on Exhibition Road in London, is a centre of geographical excellence.

Aside from the many celebrated explorers and epic journeys it has supported in its almost 200 years of existence, it is also the repository of 100,000 books and more than one million maps, charts and atlases dating back to the 13th century. The Society is frequented by historians, geographers, post-colonialist academics and visitors from around the world, keen to research ancient borders and centres of power.

Maps were originally about possession and control, and it was this fact that inspired the first artwork commissioned by the RGS for its new artistic programme. Created by the British-Indian artist Hormazd Narielwalla, Expanding Universe is a wall piece measuring 6.5 metres across and nearly four metres high, and consisting of 15 interlinked works that together form a map of an imaginary universe.

The artist has used old tailoring patterns as the basis of the artwork, and the markings on these have a fascinating complexity. The twitching, frenetic skeins and lines look like morse code; they could be incomprehensible signals from outer space, or traces of the journey of a snail trailing off the page.

Onto these graphic markings Narielwalla has painted planets, mythical characters and sea creatures in acrylic and gold leaf. The result is a glorious artwork of radiant colour and idiosyncratic beauty, and one that it is easy to become lost in. Professor Joe Smith, director of the RGS, says he believes the work will ‘provide a striking impetus for viewers to contemplate the past, present and future of mapmaking’.

The artist spoke to Christie’s about the origins of Expanding Universe, the space race, and how the work is rooted in his personal history.

You were originally commissioned to make an artwork for the Director’s Gallery. Why did you choose the Map Room instead?

Hormazd Narielwalla: My vision for the artwork was of a massive wall piece showing an imaginary universe. When I told Joe Smith about it, we agreed that the only space big enough to hang it was in the Map Room.

Interestingly, on the wall of the room is a map where China is at the centre. This is unusual; it never happens. Apparently, in the 1700s, Chinese cartographers travelled to the Netherlands — the Dutch were the premier mapmakers at the time — to learn about Western cartography. Later, the craft moved to Britain, around the time of the empire, and they started to make maps with that idea of possession and power in mind.

Mapmaking, historically, is very problematic in the 21st-century consciousness, because it has been Europeans who have decided how countries should be viewed. Africa, for example, is much bigger than it appears on maps from the past. I believe that, for history to move on, we need to understand the past and consciously agree that it should not happen again.

How has that history been translated into Expanding Universe?

HN: I wanted my work to be a positive story. I was born in Mumbai, and my country has enjoyed 77 years of independence from colonial rule. Recently, India sent a space shuttle to the moon. I thought this was a successful mission, because, unlike the Cold War space race, it was not about great powers in competition but scientific exploration. I saw the journey to the moon as India’s recovery from colonialism.

I found a beautiful map of the Red Sea from 1800, with Gujarati iconography, made by an unknown Indian naval officer. The map charts the journey from Africa to the Middle East and features Indian ships indicating where the ports are. It is not like a traditional map, it is like a long scroll, and I lifted the ships from the map and put them into the picture as a metaphor for ships going to the moon. That is the only factual story within the work; then I just let it expand.

How much time did you spend researching at the RGS?

HN: The whole process has taken about a year and a half. Of that time, I spent a month or so in the cartographic archives and fell in love with maps from the 1500s, which depict all sorts of imaginary creatures — there are mermaids and monsters that look as if they come from Greek mythology.

But these are not children’s stories; they are in the territory of truth. They were drawn to warn sailors that a particular region was dangerous, so to be careful. I thought it would be nice to lift these symbols off and put them on my map of the universe, because we don’t know what is out there, what aliens might be lurking up in space.

Tell me about the abstract patterns in the background of the artwork.

HN: Before I did my PhD in fine art, I studied fashion, and I am very interested in the history of Savile Row [the London street famous for its tailors]. The abstract markings are taken directly from 1920s German dress patterns found in a flea market. I consider sewing patterns to be a map of the body. I think this fits in well with the idea of a map that charts the landscape and, by extension, space. By using the dress patterns, I am putting the human back into this imaginary universe.

Is it too esoteric to make a connection between your 1920s sewing patterns and the revolutions in modern art brought about by Cubism and Dadaism?

HN: Pattern-cutting has so many links to modern art history. Think of Constructivist drawing and Cubist portraits, the way you can see the entirety of an object flat and from all different angles. A lot of Cubist painters and Dadaists made costumes. But I also love the work of Joan Míró and the Surrealist idea of automatism — the idea of drawing shapes from your subconscious. There is certainly a Surrealist element to the work, such as the scorpion playing with a planet.

We tend to romanticise travel and exploration, and this seems to be a very lyrical artwork. Is there an element of escapism here?

HN: The message is about escaping into a place full of colour and hope. In my conversations with Savile Row tailors, I discovered that they shred the patterns of deceased customers. That made me think about these sewing patterns in a philosophical way. Those that survive were made for people who are no longer with us, so that idea of memory and identity comes into my work, and seeing the universe as a place of infinite possibility.

Does it have a political message?

HN: I see the work as a metaphor for migration, and particularly my own migration from India to the UK. Some people, when they think of the ‘other’, think of fear, while others see it as something exciting and unknown. I wanted to convey both those emotions. The patterns migrate from a tailoring context to an art context, from the body to the landscape, and they reflect my own personal migration across the world.

Expanding Universe will be unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society on 26 October 2024, followed in March 2025 by a solo show of work by Hormazd Narielwalla to accompany the commission. www.narielwalla.com