Terrestrial and Celestial Globes 
each 25 x 24 cm 
1989

Terrestrial Globe 
25 x 24 cm 
1988 

Celestial Globe detail
25 x 24 cm
1989 

This variation on Tom Phillips's treated book 'A Humument' takes the form of a pair of humument globes, which represent celestial and terrestrial worlds entirely of Phillips' imagination. He was inspired to make them when his friend, the globemaker and restorer Sylvia Sumira, made him a globe for his fiftieth birthday. The names of the invented stars, planets, countries and islands are taken from the text of 'A Human Document'  W.H. Mallock's Victorian novel published in 1892. Cut-out fragments of this text have been pasted on to the surface of the globes. These have been painted over with painstaking attention to detail and minute brush strokes and depict the texture of the land, the contours of the continents and a star-filled, midnight-coloured sky.

Using the cut out stencil of a half-gore (a gore being the traditional pointed paper segment for pasting onto globes) I isolated within its shape some promising parts of Mallock's novel. I found the names of strange countries and curious seas, of fantasy islands and unvisitable cities as well as the features one should expect to find on a peopled planet. Then god-like for a moment I separated the land from the waters. I learned two things about working on a spherical surface:-

i. That is is very pleasant to paint on since, unlike a flat piece of paper one is always, so to speak, in the middle of the page.

ii. That it is vast in comparison to its apparent size and what seems a small and easily covered object takes about five times as long as one thinks.

When I had made my continents and their baroque coastlines and located features like Dante's Tent and the Fields of Tucco and made islands like Omple and Heek, I handed the globe back to Sylvia who then issued me with another stencil for the segments of the horizon ring which I worked on while she drew in the meridian and poles etc. With the horizon ring made the whole, now glowing and twirlable for fitted into the stand she had designed.

The first example (now in the Sackner Archive) became a prototype, next we decided to make a pair to echo the traditional coupling of celestial and terrestrial spheres. 

From Tom Phillips: Works and Texts 1992