Portraits
Of Place,
Maps OF
THE MIND

I’ve always loved getting lost. Taking my thoughts for a walk, soaking up new surroundings, brings a serenity and authenticity that changes how I think and act. Never knowing what’s next, I return home sweatier, muddier, but invigorated, more alive than when I set out.

My compulsion to explore—to walk and climb, to peer and prod, to meet people, ask questions, and share stories – is at the heart of who I am and what I create. When exploring a place, I look for the corners that lift. Digging beneath the surface to scoop out the meaning inside. The human history, tragedy, comedy, politics, folklore and culture that define a place become the true landmarks in my maps of the mind.

I blend my own personal experiences with the stories, anecdotes and memories of those I meet along the way. Sometimes, the truth of a place doesn’t need a narrator: it’s in the soaped-up windows of a failing mall. An abandoned pram on a sea of broken bricks. A marriage proposal with a ring delivered by drone. A man sleeping in a car, his head resting on a blaring horn.

I’m forever fascinated by our emotional bonds to place. Walking and drawing help me understand the world and my place within it. I hope my art, a fleeting snapshot, is meaningful for anyone who connects with the places and subjects I explore.

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THE ART AND PROCESS

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Gareth Fuller works in pen and ink on archival cotton board. He always draws standing up. He walks hundreds of miles and takes thousands of photos. He compiles long, sprawling lists and consults handwritten notes, digital maps, a pile of library books and the internet. His work requires patience, diligence, a certain maverick obsession and incredibly comfortable shoes.

He blends bouts of physical exploration and meticulous hand-drawing with a deep excavation of local knowledge and lived experience. The focus on each distinct phase acquires its own rhythm as the work takes shape. Some days are lost to local libraries and museums. Some days are spent simply getting lost. Whole weeks of walking; months in front of the canvas; bouts of intense solitude punctuated by periods of inspiration.

Fuller doesn’t always walk alone. Local historians, tour guides, writers and architects help flesh out facts, myths and legends. Often, it’s the spontaneous encounters with strangers that help him locate the true pulse of a place – snatched interactions during London rush-hour, quiet conversations on a bench in the Shanghai suburbs, listening to stories in the doorway of a DC liquor store, leaning in to hear above the din of a busy Beijing hutong. Real human stories of lives held together by place.

Back in the studio, the natural features and topography are drafted first – the mountains, coastlines and rivers that give a place its face. The man-made environment and culture always follow. Capturing a city on canvas is a tapestry of problems to solve. Building layer upon layer of cultural references, personal experiences, visual puns and imagined futures. Listening to music, local news and deep-dive podcasts helps him achieve a flow state: deep immersion.

In Fuller’s work, the streets, buildings and landmarks serve as vessels for meaning –narrating the psychology and social spirit of the place. It’s a process that looks to art instead of words to carve out the truth of slow journalism with the scope and storytelling of great literature.

His practice holds kinship with the dérive, psychogeography and the phenomenology of place. It investigates the identities of urban and rural places, as well as our attachment to them.

The art itself has a kinetic energy – a hypnotic, precise form of chaos – coloured with humour, satire and hidden meaning – revealing more with each viewing. A remarkable collage of fact and fiction, human patterns, systems, technologies, iconography and architecture that capture society in all its states of progress, decline, romance and glory.

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THE IMMEDIACY OF STREET ART AND THE ACCESSIBILITY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN PUNCTUATED WITH A RACONTEUR’S WINK AND WIT

A future design for London; dreamy elevated cycle paths weave amongst buildings and across the city, passing by Star Lane DLR station.

The first North Korean female pilot is depicted flying through the air. I was told she had dinner with Kim Il Sung in a hidden bunker, inside a wooded valley. Legend has it that black dragons also once lived in the valley, and that they danced in the white clouds.

BIOGRAPHY

Gareth Fuller’s art can be found hanging on walls around the world. His prints have been acquired for the permanent collections of The British Library, the Museum of London and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. His work has been exhibited at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Art Beijing, the Royal College of Art and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Beijing is currently on display at the British Ambassador’s Residence, China.

Born in Carmarthen, Wales, he is a self-taught visual artist of British and Irish heritage. He learnt to walk on Pendine Sands, the scene of several land speed records back in the 1920s. He learnt to read maps from Skip, his first Scoutmaster. By the time Skip was testing Fuller’s wayfinding skills – dropping him off in a dark field every Wednesday with only a torch and chocolate bar to find his way home – the love of getting lost was already ingrained.

This childhood sense of adventure was stoked by a nomadic 1980s upbringing moving between several RAF bases and a short stint exploring the concrete corridors, alleyways and treacherous climbing frames of an Essex council estate. Another move, this time to the nearby countryside, fuelled an early adolescence spent mountain-biking miles of byways all the way to the Suffolk border and back again.

Fascinated by storytelling in all its forms, the initial plan was to be a journalist or an actor. But school and college both required too much sitting still. So, he jumped on a train to London and got an apprenticeship at a newspaper. A wide-eyed teenager suddenly at the sharp end of economics, culture and politics – he had a front-row seat to witness how the world works, how truth is shaped and how imaginatively editors can swear. The frenetic pace of the newsroom was thrilling but hard to break into. Inspired, restless and a little defeated, Fuller moved on.

At various points, he became a taxi driver, video producer, slate miner, graphic designer, mountaineer and Stonehenge tour guide. He drove a rickshaw the length of India; navigated a car across frozen rivers through Siberia to the Arctic Circle; helped distil gin in the Amazon and worked on films for National Geographic. He pulled pints, pushed plates, climbed mountains and served cream tea on the pristine lawns of Salisbury cathedral.

The one common thread tying these adventures together was a return to London and the large canvas, poking out from behind his parent’s piano. Fuller had always drawn but London Town was his first major artwork.

It had started to feel indulgent not to somehow capture his love affair with London in all its chaos, despair and brilliance. The spirit of the newsroom remained – a desire to document his experiences, make sense of the world and somehow shape his own truth. Gradually, the large canvas began to take up more and more room in his life. A map of the mind.

Archived for extended periods, shuttled from one rented room to another. It took several years, hundreds of hours and litres of ink but eventually, it was finished.

London Town (2015) was the first major work within Purposeful Wanderings, the series Fuller is best known for – mapping his unique understanding of the world through art. Other works in this series include Purbeck (2010), Bristol (2014), Beijing (2018), Tourist Map of Pyongyang (2019), Shanghai (2022) and Washington, D.C. (2025).

Fuller’s purposeful wanderings remain an open-ended exploration, one portrait of place at a time.

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