Journal of Illustration - Transitus: Illustration as Material Crossing Ground, Apr 2023

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.

There is an increasingly significant trove of observational sketches being used by illustrators as a visual research method to document and depict community and city interactions. Illustration, for me, serves as a potent, participatory tool of visual research that catalyses such transformative conversations and bolsters relationships within the community fabric. The act of drawing goes beyond rendering an image; it fosters a way to capture, record and create multifaceted interactions between people and their environments. The focus of this article is my community research project, Barter Archive (2019–22), an initiative that employs illustration as a transitional medium, moving from mere record-keeping to constructing a visual repository of collective memory. By inviting community members to participate in the process, ‘Barter Archive’ aims to advance understanding of the intrinsic potential that illustration holds. The project underscores its function as a metaphorical method, one that can substantively shape the collective memory. Moreover, the central argument presented here is that traditional models of archiving our collective memory require innovation, demanding greater inclusivity and accessibility. To this end, the illustration-based ‘Barter Archive’ presents an alternative approach to conventional archival methods. It engages the collective community in a participatory process that ultimately enhances memory-making and preservation practices, making them more accessible across the social spectrum. In conclusion, the importance of evolving and enhancing traditional archiving methods cannot be overstressed, as they play a crucial role in the preservation and inclusivity of collective memory. The ‘Barter Archive’ project, through its unique use of illustration, reinvents the conventional processes attached to archival practices. It provides a platform where community members can actively participate and contribute to collective memory-making, subsequently fostering a better understanding of the power and potential of illustration. Implementing this innovative and transformative approach could revolutionize the archiving landscape, making it more participatory, representative and inclusive, ultimately enriching the collective memory tapestry of communities and cityscapes.

Representation plays a vital role in picture books as it has the potential to affect and alter readers’ perceptions through selected techniques and materials. In particular, the portrayal of the older adults in picture books may transfigure social well-being due to its impact on intergenerational relationships. This issue is critical as conventional portrayals may lead to societal misconceptions while constructing dismissive attitudes towards old age affecting intergenerational relationships. This article aims to reflect on how visual and verbal narrative strategies can present intergenerational relations constructively, depicting ageing as a cumulative transitional experience focusing on degrees of maturation through lifelong lived events to be shared with younger generation. As such, the article examines the illustration of ageing in the contemporary picture book, My Grandma’s Photos (2019), presenting an affirmative perspective on tackling possible challenges related to old age. The selected picture book is analysed regarding visual and textual strategies and the selective use of material culture weaved into its storyline. This is supported by structured interviews with the author, Özge Bahar Sunar, and the illustrator, Senta Urgan, to ascertain how the work evolved into its final state. Hence, the article examines the whole making process and how this process contributes to the final narrative. We point out the relevance between the portrayal of the older adult via the life course approach and pinpoint the positive intergenerational relationships. In sum, this article speculates on how My Grandma’s Photos builds bridges between generations through materialities embedded in the text and illustrations.

The graphic reportage of Andrew Humphreys and Olivier Kugler, specifically, their project The Great British Fish & Chips, is analysed in this article on three levels: first, in terms of their practices of graphic journalism; second, as a mechanism for navigating, through illustration and storytelling, difficult social and political currents about British national territory and sovereignty emergent in Brexit; and third, building upon critical theory already established in modern art history, as a matrix of the theoretical propositions offered by nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic category of the ‘index’. Using ‘indexical strategies’ within illustrative practice, Humphreys and Kugler bring forth the ironic tensions within certain constructions of ‘British’ identity. Ultimately, consider The Great Fish & Chips as an exploratory site for the larger proposition that the indexical relation might be the primary mode of illustration itself.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films question what audiences may conceive to be inanimate and bring these objects into a new sphere of categorization. New eco-philosophical schools of thought have recently raised the dualistic definitions of the terms ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ as problematic. Philosophical approaches of ‘new materialism’ point to agency inherent to all objects. Utilizing the term ‘non-human’ within this article will enable a more nuanced grasp of what may be considered as the ‘inanimate’ and the ‘non-human’. Miyazaki utilizes a philosophical approach to ‘enchantment’ to present audiences with a complex view of the relations between the human and non-human world through a folkloric lens, thereby providing an alternative mode of eco-criticism.

This article focuses on a rarely studied set of images: Redon’s album La Maison Hantée, published in 1896 (M 160-166) based on his friend and patron Philipon’s translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s story The Haunted and the Haunters: Or, the House and the Brain (1859). Bulwer-Lytton was regarded as a significant writer in the 1830s and The Haunted and the Haunters was a well-known ghost story that contributed to establishing some recurrent narrative strategies of Gothic literature. Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was an avid reader who believed in the power of reading to explore the imagination. While Redon claimed he was not influenced by literature, he mingled with many literary figures of his time and published series of drawings linked to Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert’s texts. Redon developed strategies to ‘interpret’ texts, rather than traditionally illustrate them, such as condensed narrative or the selection of existing drawings. Rather than base his works on narratives, he often sought another type of connection between the image and text, what he called a ‘transmission’. Setting itself in opposition to Leeman’s claims in his 1994 book that Redon’s images for this project are ‘reductive, purely illustrative visuals’, this article aims to show that there are essential and complex connections between Bulwer-Lytton’s Gothic text, its reception in late-nineteenth-century France, and Redon’s artistic production and interest in the occult at the time. Using Genette’s notion of ‘hypertextuality’ the article argues that this set of images is an exploration of Gothic techniques and tropes, a ‘transmission’ of Redon’s curiosity for occult practices and imagery.

This article will present and analyse 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 customizing 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 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.