Ewan David Eason takes the city as his raw material and returns it transformed. Working from maps, he redraws street networks and building footprints in gold leaf until what remains is both a precise document and a pure abstraction.
Each piece is constructed by hand with a level of accuracy that borders on the obsessive, gold leaf applied building by building across entire city grids, a process that can take months.
His discovery of Charles Booth's 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty was a turning point: by replacing Booth's colour-coded poverty classifications with a single gold, Eason collapsed the hierarchy the original map was built to enforce.
His work has been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Barbican, Christie's, and in a solo exhibition at 45 Park Lane in London. It was also featured in the BBC adaptation of The Night Manager.
