Several years ago while living in Boston, artist Peter Gorman decided to take a really long bicycle ride—a year-long circuit of North America that would eventually cover eleven thousand miles. Traveling under pedal power, Gorman experienced places in a new way. Cities, roads, bridges, expressways, railroad tracks and even highway intersections became places he wanted to share. He found inspiration from various sources, like color-coded transit maps of New York City and Chicago, as well as the 1960 book The Image of the City by urban theorist Kevin Lynch.
"Lynch describes how people make mental maps of where they live," Gorman says, "experiential representations of a place as it is perceived, as opposed to an objective representation." Gorman started creating his own experiential representations of the places he biked through; his quirky, often whimsical "minimalist maps" were well received by friends and family. When he returned, Gorman had enough material for Barely Maps: The Book, published in 2019.
After his epic journey, Gorman moved to Seattle, where he met and fell in love with architect AJ Taaca, who had grown up on Oahu. The couple moved to Hawaii following an extended stay during the 2018 eruption. "Things just came together for us. We had really fallen in love with Hawaii Island, and it became a possibility about a year later," says Gorman, who now lives in Waikoloa Village.
Artist Peter Gorman's map of Hawaii Island, one of a series, depicts its varied climate zones with a collage of more than a thousand geotagged photos from Instagram.
Living on Hawaii Island meant exposure to yet another way of looking at cartography, and more maps. "In the book Kanaka Hawaii Cartography by Renee Pualani Louis with Moana Kahele, I learned about the Hawaiian understanding of cartography, how it combines navigation and verbal arts along with a much more metaphorical and multisensory approach," Gorman says. "It gives a unique perspective on place."
Naturally, Gorman started making Hawaii maps: stops along the defunct Hamakua Coast railroad, Halemaumau in Kilauea Caldera, the Kahuku Unit of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and Kona cloud forests, among many others—enough for a second book, which Gorman plans to publish in the near future.
Gorman sells his work online, at the Hilo Farmers Market and the monthly Kokua Kailua village stroll on Alii Drive, where he sets up in front of Hulihee Palace. For Gorman, sharing his artful maps has been as rewarding as creating them. "It's been fun making these maps and meeting the people who buy them," he says. "I get to share what I'm learning—I can show them how the island is formed by the different volcanoes, for example. And they give me information that I can incorporate into future maps. There's a lot of give-and-take."
