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Satomi MatobaSatomi Matoba was born in 1960 in Hiroshima. She gained her BA in painting in Japan and her MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. She has exhibited in Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Britain, where she contributed works to The Map Is not the Territory exhibitions at England & Co. Her work was subsequently included in (C)artography: Map-Making as an Artform at the Crawford Gallery, Cork (2007).
Matoba says that her work "reflects an experience of living between two worlds, Hiroshima and London, renegotiating my space between conflicting systems. I dissolve familiar maps in order to reconstruct the world suggesting an open-ended potential of shifting boundaries."
In 2016, the British Library acquired a copy of Matoba's Topographical Map of Utopia from England & Co, and it was included in the Library's major exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line (November 2016–March 2017).
S. R. Ferdinand, in his essay, ‘I Map Therefore I Am Modern: Cartography and global modernity in the visual arts’, published by the University of Amsterdam in 2017, writes extensively of Matoba’s practice, and describes how “the collages that make up Map of Utopia are composed of pre-existing maps, which Matoba has scanned and digitally rearranged in surprising ways… In presenting unreal geographies, in which distant cities and obdurate geologies are cast in unlikely new ensembles, Matoba’s works recall and revisit a rich history of maps presenting fictive, utopian or otherwise intangible worlds.”
Works by Satomi Matoba are available from England & Co.
Size variable within the edition of 50
Digitally manipulated map
The British Library acquired one of this edition from England & Co.