Gareth Fuller’s art hangs 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.

Fuller's drawings act as a layered gaze into the identity of urban and rural places, transcribing their personal, geographical, and social meanings into what he calls ‘maps of the mind’. The results are vast and intricate hand-drawn compositions – a series of visual portraits that express his personal and purposeful wanderings.

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 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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