J Maizlish Mole

J Maizlish Mole is an artist, mapmaker, songwriter and activist whose practice investigates place, orientation and the politics of space. His intricately hand-drawn memory maps are the result of long, solitary journeys on foot or by car, charting cities, islands and remote landscapes with obsessive detail and poetic subjectivity.

Blending Land Art with a surrealist sensibility, his cartographic works resist conventional systems of measurement and classification, offering instead an “irrational geography” shaped by experience, memory and imagination. These maps have appeared as guide leaflets, permanent installations and monographs, produced for organisations including Collective Edinburgh, Edinburgh Art Festival, and the Gateway Foundation in St Louis.

In 2023, he completed The Union Block — a 4,400 sq ft mural in downtown Hastings, Michigan — a towering hand-drawn outline of the United States marked only by a small red asterisk and the words You are here.

Born in California in 1973, Maizlish studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Art. He has exhibited and performed widely across Europe and North America. He currently lives in Michigan and runs the micro-label Figs of London.