Here’s my story

Once, I was travelling across an ice field in Antarctica, when I was struck by the feeling that this is my home planet.

It was close to midwinter, but there was enough light in the sky, around noon, to see the peaks and glaciers to the east, the frozen sea littered with icebergs to the west.

There was no sign of human life, no sign of any life.

Despite the barrenness — or perhaps because  of it — there was that feeling:

this is where I live

this planet is my home

Since that day, in my travels on the seven continents — on the swell of the Atlantic and the dunes of the Sahara; along the canals of Venice and the alleyways of Jerusalem; on the steps of Varanasi and the streets of San Francisco — I’ve tried to recapture that feeling.

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of mapping this planet:

the places we call here

the places we call elsewhere

And I’ve always been intrigued by the impossibility of representing a three-dimensional planet on a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

No matter how carefully calculated our projections, no matter how creative our shadows and our contours, it can never be done:

this Earth refuses to be flat

How to capture that refusal?

How to capture the mountains? the valleys? the continents? the oceans?

How to capture that feeling:

this is where we live

this planet is our home

How to capture that feeling and hold it in our hands?

I’m making globes that are unlike any you’ve ever seen: fully three-dimensional, carved out of wood. What makes my globes unique is that you’ll be able to feel  the texture of our planet.