An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places

What if these were fragments of the same place?

While looking back at paintings made across several years, I began noticing that certain elements kept returning — lakes, rivers, palms, ruins and fragments of architecture. They had never been consciously conceived as parts of the same place, yet gradually the paintings began to feel like fragments of a shared imagined territory.

An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places grew out of this discovery. Rather than designing a fictional world and then illustrating it, I began mapping a geography that seemed to have been forming within the paintings without my being fully aware of it. Individual works became surveys of this landscape, assigned to fictional quadrants and accompanied by atlas notes recording recurring landmarks, uncertain connections and areas that remain unexplored.

Read the Studio Note: On Discovering an Atlas

Map from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, divided into fictional quadrants with surveyed locations and unsurveyed territory.
Map from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, divided into fictional quadrants with surveyed locations and unsurveyed territory.
Plate I, Quadrant A2 from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a red imagined landscape with palm trees and its location within the fictional atlas.
Plate I, Quadrant A2 from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a red imagined landscape with palm trees and its location within the fictional atlas.
Plate VI, Quadrant C3 from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a palm tree and architectural landscape with its location within the fictional atlas.
Plate VI, Quadrant C3 from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a palm tree and architectural landscape with its location within the fictional atlas.
Atlas fragment showing the unreached western edge of the fictional geography in An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places.
Atlas fragment showing the unreached western edge of the fictional geography in An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places.
Plate V, Quadrant D2, Second Survey from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a lake surrounded by trees and recurring vegetation within the fictional atlas.
Plate V, Quadrant D2, Second Survey from An Unfinished Atlas of Imagined Places by Jasper van den Ham, showing a lake surrounded by trees and recurring vegetation within the fictional atlas.