Amelia Archer

Amelia is a portrait artist, utilising maps for collage to render a realistic and lively depiction of each subject.
She has never been able to use maps for their intended navigational purpose as where others see useful routes and roads, Amelia sees pictures.
Her many unplanned sojourns while attempting to navigate with maps have left her totally bemused by their practical applications, and instead, she started to render portraits depicting life journeys.
Facial contours aren’t dissimilar to cartographic contours, and Amelia’s digital collages incorporate the geographical journey of each subject to present portraits which convey an identity clothed in character and history.
Starting with a pencil sketch, Amelia reduces each face to basic shapes onto which map pieces can be overlaid – it isn’t dissimilar to working on a jigsaw puzzle. Once happy with her pencil depictions, Amelia transfers to digitial tools and high resolution maps from Ordnance Survey to begin the process of pulling the pieces together and finalising decisions about which maps to use and where. Her digital tool box includes Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Procreate and her much-loved Wacom tablet.