Connecting the cheese
Wonderful things have happened since the word about The Cheese Map came out. I’ve gotten in touch with cheese enthusiasts from all over the world, and already learned a lot more about strange and exotic cheeses I hadn’t heard of before. Doing a Kickstarter turns out to be a great way to reach out to other people with your ideas. Cheese schools have contacted me and asked me if I want to collaborate with them or teach classes on the overlap between food and art. I’ve gotten the feedback I needed to take this work further.
Through Twitter I’ve gotten in touch with enthusiastic cheese bloggers. We’ve shared jokes and cheese facts, and one of them even got back to me after a couple of days with a map of New Zealand he had made out of electron microscope photos of a local blue cheese. He told me I had inspired him to make it, so now I even have a NZ ambassador that inspires me back.
I also reached out to Mike Geno, a talented artist that paints portraits of cheese. He was recently featured in The New York Times for his work, and this is how I got to know him. We obviously share the passion for cheese, but we also realized that we have the same mission about discovering cultures through food, even if the modes of expression are different. As he was heads down with new commissions lately and I am wrapping up my spring semester, we agreed to meet sometime over the summer to talk more about each others work. Looking forward to it.
Oh, and I also have to mention the awesome cheese hat I got from one of my backers. That made my day!
A tribute to cheese
I’ve had a fascination for cheese for as long as I can remember. When I grew up, there was pretty much two types of cheese on my table: “the brown cheese” and “the yellow cheese”. The first one was sweet and the latter a mild, but salty kind of cheese. For a couple of years, my perception of cheese was therefore divided into these two directions.
As I grew older and started to explore what other things I could put on my bread, I discovered the fascinating world of blue cheese and sharper cheese made of goat’s milk. My tastebuds got excited, and ever since I’ve been curious to try out the local cheeses whenever I travel to a new place.
Which brings me to The Cheese Map.
Behind this rich variety of cheese, there are fascinating stories about where each one of them originate from. I started to make graphic illustrations of this, and I got immersed in how the cheese textures take the place of a country’s topography. Deep blue rivers occur and new mountain ranges rise.
The Cheese Map project has just hatched. I really want to explore more cheeses and try to create a world map to see the interesting similarities between cheese traditions in different cultures. My Kickstarter campaign will eventually help me realize this.
-The Brown Cheese of Norway-
