Published on the occasion of an exhibition "Damien Hirst : black scalpel cityscapes" held at White Cube, São Paulo, November 11, 2014 - January 31, 2015.

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.

In 2014, Damien Hirst (born 1965) unveiled a new series of paintings made up of vast numbers of surgical instruments that combine to form bird's-eye views of cities from around the world. With the Black Scalpel Cityscapes, Hirst investigates subjects pertaining to the sometimes-disquieting realities of modern life--surveillance, urbanization, globalization and the virtual nature of conflict--as well as those relating to the human condition in general, such as our inability to arrest physical decay. Described by the artist as "portraits of living cities," the series is illustrated in full and accompanied by a comprehensive list of artwork details in this signed limited edition, which features a black zipper down the spine. The volume also includes an essay by Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps, and a fictional short story by novelist and arts writer Michael Bracewell.

Trope London, the second volume in the Trope City Editions series highlighting the world's most architecturally compelling cities, is a highly curated collection of photographic images from an active community of urban photographers who have passionately captured their city like never before.

Model-making: Materials and Methods focuses primarily on the wide variety of materials that can be employed to make models; those which have been favoured for a while and those which are relatively new. The book looks at how these materials behave and how to get the best out of them, then illustrates a range of relatively simple methods of building, shaping, modelling, surfacing and painting with them. Useful features of the book include: the different uses of models in various disciplines; the sequence of making; planning and construction, creating surfaces, painting and finishing; methods of casting, modelling and working with metals; step-by-step accounts of the making of specially selected examples; simple techniques without the need for expensive tools or workshop facilities; a 'Directory' of a full range of materials, together with an extensive list of suppliers. This book is intended for students of theatre production, art & architecture, animation and theatre/television set designers where accurate scale models are necessary, and is also of interest to anyone involved with the process of making forms in 3D and the challenge of making small-scale forms in general. Superbly illustrated with 185 colour photographs.