Tender Maps Av Alice Maddicott

Tender Maps is an attempt to define the indefinable, and an exploration of why it is so crucial that we try. From the bluebell woods of Somerset to the freeways of LA, from Istanbul to Nashville, Tbilisi to Venice, Alice Maddicott has journeyed restlessly in search of the thing that meant the most to her: the feeling of a place. But this is more than a travelogue - it''s also a journey of ideas about our experience of place, which encompasses early mapmaking , radical land art, Celtic Christianity, Situationism, children''s literature, and much more. Throughout this exploration is threaded the concept of tender mapping starting with 17th century maps of tenderness and later introducing the embroidered maps made by young girls in the 18th century, Tender Maps navigates the different ways that women and girls locate their emotional experiences of moving through their world. Tender Maps also has a strand of personal memoir; a search for a home. After being made homeless during the pandemi

'Of all the places where I feel the translucency of things, places that are thin for me, bluebell woods are first among them.'Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or to see a city's sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music, literature and art. Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to place, this extraordinary book explores the author's relentless travelling, from the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan.With her uniquely lyrical approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with landscape that is the very essence of human creativity. From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo Calvino and L. M.Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is a beautifully evocative book of travel, culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place. 'A rich and beguiling work of literary travel memoir that nimbly tracks the wider contours of the world in terms of feeling, memory, introspection and the imagination.' - Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Vanishing Places