Items where Subject is "Illustration"

Zine, self and micro-publishing has seen a spectacular resurgence in the
last decade, with individuals within tight communities pushing the boundaries of the practice in terms of form, content and process.

This paper will examine ways in which this reinvestment of illustrative authorship
has been stimulated by the iterative and performative aspects of zines, self and
micro-publishing, through the discussion of varied publications’ genesis with their
illustrators – including my own self-published book The House.

This paper will consider how performance underpins both the motivation and
creative process of such publications so as to highlight potential contributions of
the scene to wider illustrative authoring practices.

In recent years, the mainstream press in the UK and France have devoted significant attention to illustrated imagery in communicating contemporary events. In particular, the illustrated image via reportage has become a prominent tool for articulating the identities of individuals at the margin of society, for example victims of war, refugees and displaced people. This article explores this alternative method of reporting by focusing on the considerable coverage that the Jungle camp at Calais has received through reportage across the British and French press and beyond. Utilising Fuyuki Kurasawa’s essay ‘Humanitarianism and the Representation of Alterity: the Aporias and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Visuality’ (2010), the article looks at the reporting of the refugees’ situation through an analysis of illustrations presented in articles and blogs published by The Guardian, Le Monde, Libération and Arte. It examines the potential for reportage illustrations to provide ‘thicker’ representations, more complex discourses and new or alternative approaches to the construction of identities, in particular identities that constitute ‘the other’ within the contemporary European scopic regime. The article finds that the construction of the subjects’ identity follows established tropes which are related to the methods and conditions of creation, and that there is a need to query existing approaches in order to question dominant discourses of identity. Moreover, we suggest that within the case of such image making, it is the identity of the artist/publisher/reader that is ultimately asserted, within the context of a humanitarian discourse.

In recent years, the mainstream press in the UK and France have devoted significant attention to illustrated imagery in communicating contemporary events. In particular, the illustrated image via reportage has become a prominent tool for articulating the identities of individuals at the margin of society, for example victims of war, refugees and displaced people. This article explores this alternative method of reporting by focusing on the considerable coverage that the Jungle camp at Calais has received through reportage across the British and French press and beyond. Utilising Fuyuki Kurasawa’s essay ‘Humanitarianism and the Representation of Alterity: the Aporias and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Visuality’ (2010), the article looks at the reporting of the refugees’ situation through an analysis of illustrations presented in articles and blogs published by The Guardian, Le Monde, Libération and Arte. It examines the potential for reportage illustrations to provide ‘thicker’ representations, more complex discourses and new or alternative approaches to the construction of identities, in particular identities that constitute ‘the other’ within the contemporary European scopic regime. The article finds that the construction of the subjects’ identity follows established tropes which are related to the methods and conditions of creation, and that there is a need to query existing approaches in order to question dominant discourses of identity. Moreover, we suggest that within the case of such image making, it is the identity of the artist/publisher/reader that is ultimately asserted, within the context of a humanitarian discourse.

In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.

Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.

Erratically embellished with sprayed stencils, logo-rich stickers, elaborate murals, and unintelligible doodles, our urban environment overflows with irreverent and unlicensed imagery.

Classic New York freehand and wildstyle graffiti has evolved, adapted, and atomised into a democratic and divergent forms of visual expression that is captured under the nebulous term ‘street art’. ‘It is characterised’, states curator Riika Kuittinen, ‘less by a visual style than by an approach to transmission: it is unfiltered visual communication, fluidly moving across the derelict buildings,bus shelters and hoardings of cities across the world.” Armed with attitude of irreverence, equality and freedom, it is in fact a new genre that mutates and morphs at the rate of a viral pandemic. Lacking a common aesthetic, street art, a term loathed by classic wall ‘writers’ speaks loudly to a passing population, even if it remains entirely obscure to most.

The exhibition asked a number of questions about the evolution of graffiti into ‘street art’, and more recently into ‘urban art’, by way of the alleyway and backwall. Where do such images truly belong now: in the alleys of our urban centres or on the white walls of the gallery? Can they belong in both? What happens when the urban calligraphy of tags and stencils is subsumed by the auction
house, and why do we feel a sense of loss when the raw energy of street art, of urban writing, is absorbed by the mainstream media, and effectively tamed. Why is that some of the best illicit art of the street is promptly ripped off the wall, taken out of its context, seized into private hands. In effect moved from the public wall to
behind a pay wall.

There are many dynamic communities of practice within the arts but not all of them can claim to have their own research culture. Consequently, many researchers become adept at co-opting theoretical frameworks, research methods, and language from other disciplines. But what happens when we use concepts and language developed elsewhere to address our own particular disciplinary concerns? Language matters, and as the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted, language is not a nomenclature—it is not simply a question of linking a set of words to a pre-existing set of things; different languages
divide up the continuum of the world differently.
It follows that the ways that we engage with other disciplines potentially has a bearing on how we see, think and talk about our home discipline. This conference explores the
challenges and benefits of research that features significant interaction between two or more disciplines. It will explore [even contest] ‘trans-’, ‘cross-’ and ‘multi-’ disciplinary approaches to research.

This article presents and analyses the results of a research workshop conducted during and after the 2022 Transitus symposium at Falmouth University. The article aims to explore our visions of physical space, travel and migration through stock landscape illustration. The workshop invited illustrators to draw a five-step sequence of images customising a stock landscape by turning it into a view out of their window, thus exploring how a visual digital ‘airport’, a utopian hub of a stock landscape, disintegrates into particularities of individual experiences. The resulting sequences of images were put together in an online magazine about illustration, slonvboa.ru, and are available here: http://slonvboa.ru/nonlandscape (Accessed 10 June 2023) This webpage collects 30-minute drawings from fourteen illustrators based in ten countries: Armenia, Dubai, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, with ten of the participants being based outside of their home country. Building upon the idea of the ‘nomadic illustration’ suggested by Catrin Morgan and Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, this article will explore further similarities between nomadism and the circulation of stock imagery. It will thus use the term ‘nomadic’ not only as a metaphor, but also as a direct link to migration studies and studies of digital nomadism, which often describes the precarious occupation of a migrating illustrator. This project will aim to highlight the unlikely possibilities that stock illustration may offer as a point of connection, rather than presenting stock landscapes an alienating utopian abstraction. It will also analyse how individual authorial strategies deal with the notion of space, and how artistic means shape our visions of private and public spaces.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

This paper addresses the contemporary and simultaneous rise of glitch art alongside the contemporary turn to craft within the illustrative field. Starting from an analysis of Menkman's 2011 The Glitch Moment(um), it seeks to understand the use of glitches and errors within the illustrators visual vocabulary, through aesthetic and symbolic interpretation of the glitch moment. Drawing upon the concept of the 'glitch-like' as a frequent description of the illustrator's relationship to the error, it argues that the professional illustrator is frequently constrained in their use of pure glitches within their working process due to a number of factors; and instead utilises the error initially through experimental appropriation, and then through normalisation and finally incorporation into the toolbox of the artist. However the paper also recognises the increasing prevalence and (literal) encoding of glitch-like readymades within modern software and associated artistic tools.

The paper proposes that the digital glitch in contemporary illustration exists as an attempt to encode and render the materiality of the digital process and digital product visible, in much the same way that the rise of traditional craft and imperfection in other areas of illustration practice seek to make visible evidence of the artist's hand and the materiality of working processes. The paper seeks to address the inherent contradiction that exists between the notion of craftsmanship and error, and suggests that disruption of the flow of work offers a valuable intervention that enables us to evaluate and re-interpret practices, both as maker, and reader of visual texts.

This paper was motivated by an enthusiasm and curiosity to investigate the origins of the illustrated visual language associated with skateboarding. The conspicuous displays articulated the adrenalin thrills of the act itself and disseminated a potent visual code to juvenile consumers eager to establish their rebellious, anti-social credentials. This paper sought out the rich visual iconography associated with Californian youth movements (brought to light by Woolfe in his essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965) and attempted to establish a clear lineage between the legacy of Hot-rod customisation practices and the graphic heritage of skateboard culture best characterised by popular skateboard brands such as Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, which established the resilient visual inheritance that would eventually transform the perception of these counter cultural attitudes and motifs.

The accident has long been acknowledgedas a catalyst fororiginal thought and can offer new insights to the practitioner wishing to develop thingswhich have never been contemplated or seen before. If we accept Virilio’s (2007) description of the accident as “profane miracle”, how can we instigate such mishaps, or even recognise their potential in the increasingly homogeneous digital landscape in which Illustrators find themselves?Is it even possible to override the restrictive mental parameters we are preconditioned to accept?This paper will aim to locate ways in which students of illustration can thrive by instigating accidents or disrupting the inhibitive characteristics of the technologies that surround us. I intend to seek out contemporary illustrators and investigate how they jump starttheir own creative process in order to develop a repertoire of strategies that reveal, or disclose,ways in which eurekamoments can occur. It will investigate whether the D.I.Y mind-set (forever associated with punkattitudes and tastes) that encouraged experiments, riskand feedback, is still relevant to current illustration practices. It will point towards ways in which art educators can incite innovativevisual thinking and nurture image makersthat stand in opposition to algorithmical mediocrity; Illustrators match-fit for the 21stCentury.

This paper is part of a continuing project of repositioning or appropriating practices from the wider cultural landscape with the intention of broadening the conceptual landscape of illustration. Specifically, the aim here is the appropriation of the work of celebrated filmmaker and journalist Adam Curtis as illustration. Rather than any detailed explanation of the intention or original context of this work, this paper aims to utilise Curtis’s practice as a hypothetical space to explore various instances of interdisciplinary appropriation and mischaracterisation in particular regards to an expanded notion of illustration.

Taking the vernacular ornamental quality perceivable within the built environment as a catalyst, this article will attempt to position the sometimes-eccentric housing development of Poundbury in Dorset as a framework for Illustration practice.
The particular auspices of the new town are utilised as a discursive springboard into the idea of illustration as part of a communicative artefact in a wider physical and social context.
To this end, this article explores the Poundbury development itself as a set of images presented within the larger communication of the town. This is done with reference to architecture's interactions with ornament as well as specific overlaps between design, image and architecture. This article goes on to consider the social ramifications of such material as it forms the content of communication to a wider audience.
The priority of this investigation is the wilful exploration of this potentialy disparate subject matter under shifting definitions of illustration practice in order to open up and explore such practice.

This article utilizes similarities and overlaps between the work of Joseph Beuys and the increasingly prominent illustrative and performative practices of live scribing or graphic recording as a springboard into a further discourse regarding management theory and creative practice. The idea of the graphic recorder or graphic facilitator originated from interactions between management theory, architecture and the new age counterculture of the 1970s. In recent times, embodied as the live scribe, such practice may now be considered within a seemingly incongruous overlap of management theory and contemporary illustration.

Joseph Beuys in his own way was also a ‘live scribe’. Designated under his all-encompassing concept of ‘social sculpture’, his was a performative art; constructed with the ambitious aim of healing social ills and reuniting elements of the primitive and modern. This article – delivered in part as an illustrated timeline – will act as a speculative survey of equivalences, links and historical foreshadows resonating between the work of Joseph Beuys and contemporary practices of live scribing or graphic recording.

As UK universities undergo unprecedented internationalisation, they struggle to shape a plethora of cultural and social capitals into an educational environment that is fair and equitable for all. ‘While academia has opened its doors, it has been unwilling or unable to dismantle the norms, networks, and practices that reproduce white, rich male privilege’ states Shilliam (Shilliam, 2014, p.15). With existing concepts of social justice proving adequate, lecturers seek new interpretative models of inclusivity.

In teaching MA Fine Art, Illustration and Drawing, communities of practice are facilitated through discussion, collaboration and engagement between students of differing backgrounds, nationalities, life experiences and neurodiversity. Critical reflection and experiential learning are deeply embedded in these courses and their assessment. The documents that result, support and narrate an individual’s developmental journey, whilst contextualising the self within wider discourses and debates. Reviewing these textual and visual outputs in the context of unconscious gender bias, led me to consider the trajectory of autobiography in terms of diversity.

This article is a launchpad for further enquiry. It questions whether present-day assessments somehow mirror the patriarchal attributes of men’s autobiographies that traditionally focused on power, success and achievement within the public realm. It also examines the more personal, introspective modes of women’s day-to-day self-referential writings for more useful approaches. Perhaps the memoirs, house-keeping records, correspondence and diaries representing women’s real-life narratives have specific relevance to students reflecting and analysing their progress. Feminist artists strategically constructed autobiographies to accentuate the issues women faced. Maybe students could appropriate these methodologies to re-imagine, re-present and rewrite their learning experiences. Autobiography encompasses the subjective, embodied and relational complexities of memory, narrative, creativity, identity, experience and intentionality (Smith & Watson, 2012, p.8). Given these characteristics, the genre arguably demands more consideration in art education.

This paper documents the Author’s experiments with 3D-based AI image generation software, identifying within the visual outcomes a tendency towards hauntology that is seemingly the result of the collaborative image-making process as well as a material quality of the method. The paper suggests that a combination of the authors own aesthetic concerns and working methods, combined with the tendencies inherent within the training method used to develop the Stable Diffusion AI model, results in images that are haunting in a number of ways that align to the conceptual framework of Hauntology: through unexpected traces and glitches; anachronism; notions of shared dreaming / remembering; and through the invocation of the poor image.

This paper examines notions of truth in relation to fictive modalities and discourses presented in animation and constructed imagery. It explores how notions of minimal departure and recentering of the audience are utilised within fictive depictions as narrative devices that allow the viewer to integrate truth statements into an understanding of their own world.

Drawing upon discussion of documentary animation, it considers how constructed images utilise a range of modalities in order to posi- tion discourses and make statements about reality that can affect the audience through emotional connections. Following this, the paper con- siders Lewis’ and Marie-Laure Ryan’s examination of possible worlds within literary texts. It examines how constructed images negotiate the telling of truths via truth clusters, and how the recentering of audiences in relation to the fictive worlds through those clusters allows for truth to emerge in the bridging between their world and the fictive world.

The paper proceeds to question whether texts combining low modalities or high fictionality are able to present truths through a collusion between the audience and authors’ worlds. It explores this notion through an analysis of the animated film Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and Scavengers. The paper suggests that such texts utilize playful relocation and recentering towards fictive worlds in order to articulate truth claims about our real-world experiences, and can do so through the utilization of lower modalities and significant departures from such experiences.

The Queen of Spades Project is an experimental collaborative project by Joel Lardner and Paul Roberts, Illustration at Arts University Bournemouth. The project explores Alexander Pushkin’s supernatural tale of obsession and risk, The Queen of Spades (1834), and expands on the visual language of Joel Lardner’s 2011 illustrated picture book of the same name. The picture book has always appealed to Illustrators in that it encourages the expansion of a particular visual language and provides a platform with which to build, explore, and examine imaginary worlds.

The research imperative throughout the project has been to harness emerging games technology in order to transform how storytelling and picture books can be understood and reinterpreted. VR technology provides the potential for readers to inhabit a story and offers multi-dimensional insights from within a text. The ability to alternate between characters or intervene at points within the plot opens up new insights as to how stories will be enacted and experienced. Illustrators are uniquely placed to adopt and occupy this new fascinating and portentous field of study -
whether as games makers, or interactive storytellers. An animated experimental film completed in 2016 forms part of an ongoing project exploring the potential for storytelling and illustration within the digital environment.

This film was awarded certificate of Merit in the category of Animation in the 2016 Three x Three International Illustration Awards, USA. It was also selected for screening during the Motion Commotion event on July 11 2018 at ICON 10 International Illustration Conference in Detroit, USA.