The nature of Phalane’s map art transcends the purely diagrammatic or semiotic. They are not mere signposting. Like many cartographers, Phalane knows that embellishing maps with artistic elements can enhance their effect, making them more compelling through shear visual creativity. Aeroplanes and helicopters abound in the skies over his maps. But as an artist, Phalane has swung around the relationship between maps and art. He uses maps to further his own artistic vision. Cartography provides Phalane with a rich vein of concepts and imagery to mine, exploit and upend. Conventional maps can do no more than point the way to unpredictable, individual experience, while Phalane’s maps embody those experiences.

Each map represents a personal, visionary experience of a particular stretch of road. It not only represents the land from above, but ‘sideways’ and ‘upwards’ as well. This is evident in the novel way in which he portrays the sky: looking down on the earth usually precludes representing the sky. It is ‘behind’ the immediate vision of the observer. Phalane, however, adds the sky on the edges of his mountain ranges, where it appears to be water or sea mass. This in effect results in a picture that inadvertently curls up at the sides to form the sky above the surface of the earth in a convex-like shape. One is reminded of the opening line of the metaphysical poet, John Donne’s famous sonnet, full of far-fetched imagery, witty conceits and fanciful notions: “At the round earth’s imagined corners”. In effect, Phalane takes the round earth and flattens it on a piece of paper.

John Phalane was born in Tzaneen, Limpopo on 19 January 1957. He was the first-born child, followed by a brother and a sister. John went to Nogoboya School in Tzaneen in 1965 and left school in 1974. He worked as driver for the Inanda Country Club in Johannesburg between 1980 and 1996. He then returned to Limpopo, ferrying people from the southern parts of the province to Mazina in the north and to other parts of Venda. The street maps of Johannesburg originated in 2004, when he first took up making art. They were done from his memory and his imagination. At that stage he traversed Limpopo and was intimate with all the highways and back roads of the province. He consequently was in a perfect position to map this part of South Africa in and through his art.