The Cartography of Purgatory: Roger Mortimer’s Internal Atlas

 

​Roger Mortimer’s recent body of work operates at the intersection of cartography and cosmology, transforming the objective authority of the map into a stage for subjective, mythic enactment. By appropriating historical charts of Aotearoa—specifically the coastlines and survey grids of the post colonial era—Mortimer does not merely document territory; he reinvents it as a moral landscape.

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​The artist’s distinctive visual lexicon borrows heavily from medieval manuscript illumination, particularly the Divine Comedy’s illustrations of the Inferno and Purgatorio. Yet, these figures—penitents, demons, and wanderers—are not traversing the circles of an Italian hell, but the familiar bays and headlands of New Zealand. This juxtaposition creates a jarring anachronism that collapses time: the colonial anxiety of the surveyor merges with the existential anxiety of the pilgrim.

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​Mortimer’s figures are archetypal rather than individual. Small, stylized, and often engaged in obscure rituals of measurement or punishment, they navigate a terrain that is simultaneously physical and psychological. The recurrent motifs of compasses and thumb-lines suggest a desperate search for orientation in a world where the moral coordinates are shifting. In this sense, Mortimer is a contemporary myth-maker, proposing that the map is never a neutral document, but a projection of our internal navigation—a chart of our collective and personal salvation.