Fantasy's Spell: The Art of Enchantment
The Galleries at Moore
1916 Race St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 29, 2025
“I wisely started with a map and made the story fit,” J.R.R. Tolkien famously said of his approach to writing The Lord of the Rings universe into existence.
Maps are common accompaniments included by authors of fantasy invested in turning made-up worlds into something fleshed-out, reliable, even real. Moore Art Gallery’s latest exhibit, “Fantasy’s Spell: The Art of Enchantment,” pulls literary maps out of their book covers and lets them stand alone as singular artworks.
Tolkien created his own cartographic logic — a tactic that may have been about “saving writers from the wilderness of their own imagination,” as this Medium author reflected. Moore’s show primarily pulls from collaborations, focusing on the commissioned work of illustrators as marks of meaning.
Take, for instance, the wide-ranging work of artist Charis Loke, who’s crafted several maps for different escapist novels. While the maps might be understood as a reference images for plot points in the context of a book, they hold independent value when viewed by outsiders ignorant to the story they illustrate.
Loke’s maps are not complicated dictations of terrain or topography but rather accessible means of organizing the symbolically poignant pieces of the wild worlds to which she is both tourist and founder.
Her map of a citadel from The Nightshade Crown Trilogy burns geography into the fragile stained glass of a church window, integrating panels of traveling muses as borders and 15th century gothic typeface as an homage to the time period of the book.
In a map made for The Last Bloodcarver, Loke draws out the story’s debate between modern and ancient forms of knowledge by labeling different districts with animals named in the Zodiac while painting the waves of surrounding water like double helix DNA. The setting is framed by medicinal adornments; knives, microscopes, cell nuclei, skeletons and swords exist side by side, establishing an aesthetic equality that bonds competing modes of information and philosophy.
A special edition of Jade War includes a unique drawing by Loke: a map of the “Island of Kekon” is positioned on a desk, just one piece of paper contemplated among a host of other important objects: Postcards, pamphlets, a child’s drawing of “daddy,” car keys, photos, flecks of jade, a syringe, a chrystanthemum.
It’s impossible to dissect the full meaning of these images without a deeper understanding of the worlds (and words) that inspired them; they evidently act as interactive story components built to immerse readers further in the tonality, symbolism and mystery of the alternative landscapes they visit through the related literature. Moore’s exhibit includes several other artifacts — such as closets of weapons, knives and armor, forged from fiction — that explore that same principle of artistic transposition in different ways, thereby legitimizing the purpose and pratice of the fantasy genre by making evident the amount of depth required to construct a world as richly chaotic as our own.
The amount of attention dedicated to these multimedia projects shines a light on how the niche begets the great, and how no story is ever too small to be relevant or resonant.
But Loke’s creations don’t just support the visions of the authors that hired her. They imagine a new way of understanding personal direction. Her maps are less literal experiments in cartographic science than they are explorations of the forms of meaning that guide us.
Geography might be an important tool to navigate reality, but it doesn’t necessarily operate at the forefront of our mind. Sometimes it’s the backdrop of other important landmarks of a life liven, like the pair of broken glasses Loke draws on the Jade War desk, or embedded in a more central location of importance, like the place of worship that sets the scene for The Nightshade Trilogy.
Unlike Tolkien, not all of us start with the map. Our journeys can, and inevitably will, begin in unexpected places — but a map can go a long way in helping us understand our intended destination.
