The namesake of the exhibition, this series titled "Habitable Climes" draws from theories first described by Aristotle in which the Earth was thought to have five climes: the Arctic and Antarctic, or North and South frigid zones; the North and South temperate zones; and one very hot zone between the two tropical zones. Only the temperate zones were thought to be habitable. Referred to by Claudius Ptolemy as a zone on a map, 'climes' persisted for hundreds of years in European cartography.
The inspiration for this work was the 'Map of the Ancient Known World', deriving from Abraham Ortelius’s landmark atlas, "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum". A 1603 example of the atlas is held within The Sunderland Collection.
Each of the five works features an emblem based on the projections of maps from the Collection that first inspired Kristina. Read more about each of these maps here.
