Illustrating The Vacuum: Carnivalesque drawing and the delimitation of communities

The Vacuum was a free newspaper published in Belfast, Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2014. This article makes reference to illustrations produced by the author and his fellow contributors in order to explore a range of ideas connected to emergent public art practices. The time frame of The Vacuum’s circulation provides the article with critical frameworks drawn from contemporaneous discourse on social engagement and participation. The concepts of ‘dialogical aesthetics’, a ‘carnivalesque’ mode of humour and a ‘paradigm of the page’ are developed in relation to The Vacuum as a whole, to the illustrations that formed one of its defining features and to the author’s experience of community and public art commissions.