Jonas Mikolayunas Turns Topographic Maps into Art

Block Island (June 2025), 32″H x 27″W x 1¾”D, maple, mahogany, and resin.

Nantucket Island (December 2024), 20″H x 32″W x 1½”D, maple, walnut, and resin.

A Cannon Mountain (July 2025), 24″H x 24″W x 6½”D, maple, walnut, and resin.

Cape Ann (October 2025), 31”H x 30”W x 1½”D, maple, mahogany, and resin.

The artist in his studio with Maui (March 2026), 24”H x 29”W x 3”D, Hawaiian koa and resin.

Jonas Mikolayunas has long been a mountain-bike guy, so it makes perfect sense that he makes art out of nature’s curves, contours, drops, and climbs.

Starting when he was five, Mikolayunas loved to take off into the woods and ride until he was exhausted—then somehow manage to get home again. This is still his bliss: “A nice, long, painful climb,” he says, “followed by a well-deserved descent.” A recent thirty-four-mile marathon up, down, and around the legendary Kingdom Trails in the mountains of Burke, Vermont, he says, “reminded me how wonderful it is to be self-sufficient and to suffer alone in the woods.”

Mountain biking combines two of Mikolayunas’s great passions: engineering and nature. He is a self-taught expert in countless principles of physics, and like nature itself, he avoids straight lines and right angles. His third great passion is art. For his BFA thesis he made a series of crowd-wowing pieces involving falling water, including a trickle down the rusting shotgun holes in a piece of sheet metal taken from an abandoned car he’d found in the woods on his mountain bike. It was visually exciting, pleasant sounding, and demonstrated the beauty of decay.

When the mechanical side of him invented and built a device to break in the disc brakes of bicycles, Mikolayunas found himself falling in love with wood and intrigued by a cool new tool that uses computer numerical control, or CNC, to control a router or a laser. A friend asked him to make a contoured, topographic, three-dimensional map of a beloved bike-trail system, so Mikolayunas spent nearly four years figuring out the computer programs, government data sets, and properties of epoxy, covering his walls with experiments and mistakes, which of course weren’t mistakes at all, because they led him to the masterpieces he makes today.

His wall sculpture of Nantucket, for instance, shows the contours of the landmass in maple, and the water around it in varying shades of blue that reveal the actual sandbars, ridges, and depths below the water. It does what art ought to do, providing a new and moving view of the world. “I’m bringing to light the things you can’t see,” he says, “the whole landscape of history and movements and time, captured in one
moment, from a perspective we could not get in any other way.”

Editor’s Note: See more of Jonas Mikolayunas’s work at mikolayunas.com(opens in new tab).