Perry created this map of a walled city as a self-portrait for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He said ‘I thought the walled city was a good metaphor – the wall, I suppose, can roughly be interpreted as your skin. But like any city, it’s dependent on the landscape it sits in as well.’

Using this theme, our students created portraits of ourselves via the medium of maps. Maps offered a creative tool to get students to think about how the parts of themselves interrelate. Which parts are bigger, and which parts are smaller? Which parts exist in a similar place? What symbols could we use to represent certain parts of ourselves?

We drew around grains of rice to create the outline of our maps, which was a fun and sensory way to get the ball rolling. Then, it was time map ourselves! There were no rules: if you wanted to fill your map with Xbox games, that was fine. If you wanted it to feature foods you liked, that was fine too. As long as it represented yourself, or an area of yourself, it was a success!

We asked our students to create self portraits using Arcimboldo’s style, based on the things that they were interested in.