Journal of Illustration - Illuminating the Non-Representable, Apr 2024

Illustration is often casually assumed to be a representational practice, where ‘something out there’ is represented, i.e. shown again, in visual form. The prefix ‘re-’ in ‘representation’ suggests that something exists prior to its pictorial rendering. With reference to a project I worked on as an illustrator with a group of older feminists who had come together to record their memories of their involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement, I use this article to propose an alternative possibility for illustration. Rather than considering illustration as representational, I submit that illustration in the process of its creation can produce the reality it refers to. It can therefore be understood as a form of performative knowledge production. In this piece, I draw on my project with the feminist group and interweave this with Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on community, Rosalind Krauss’s reflections on indexicality and Jacques Derrida’s article on the nature of declarations.

Through practice-based research, I co-developed an illustration method called the Sketch Circle to illuminate a visual definition of self for South Koreans to fill the void left by language. The method merges various participatory methods, such as Empathic and User-Centred Design, Digital Storytelling and Illustration, to empower the participants to sketch their own visual vocabulary that refers to their personal sense of self. The article outlines the methods, trials and iterations that led to the facilitation of illustration as a co-creative method to illuminate the abstract sense of self in South Korean individuals and how drawing served as an alternative form of reflection, reflexion and expression of self among others. The article concludes with how the practice serves as a pilot case for the development of the Sketch Circle method to be used in other participatory illustration research.

This article presents a research-based illustration project titled ‘Resisters: An illustrated project addressing shame among women’ self-authored as a semester-long postgraduate project at the Department of Design, IIT Delhi. The project began with understanding shame and shameful experiences of women aged 18–30 years, including college students and working professionals, through qualitative data collection and interviews. Anchored in visual communication design, it evolved into publication design and related collaterals to support the design brief. The publication serves as a resilient voice to be heard, read, shared and understood, delving into complex themes of shame and belonging. The inquiry-driven project stands at the intersection of societal messages and creative practice, validated through public display and critical feedback. Illustration as a communicative practice is crucial in today’s visually overstimulating environment, with such projects challenging the status quo within academic illustration practice.

This article examines how pedagogical theories prioritizing objects and direct sensory experiences can be applied to the creation of picturebook illustrations. In response to the need for what illustrator Eric Carle characterizes as a bridge between the tactile world of objects and the world of images, this article proposes an ‘archaeological’ approach to image-making that prioritizes observation, collection and curation of found objects and materials and harnesses those materials as image-making tools and media such that the resulting images actually contain objects instead of just mimetically reproducing them. This exploration builds upon the work of two pedagogues who attempted to unify object-based theories with picture theories – Johann Pestalozzi and Lucy Sprague Mitchell – and uses the threads of their work to weave together recommendations about archaeological image-making strategies best suited for strengthening connections between pictures and the tangible world – namely, photography, collage and tactile enhancements.

The article aims to address the challenge that the current wide-ranging and multifaceted planetary crisis poses to representation and to ways of thinking about it. It focuses on examining the role of illustration and images in selected recent theoretical works, especially in the ones concerned with the relationship between humans and the environment. What is surveyed is the terrain of selected theoretical texts associated with New Materialisms and Speculative Realism (including Object-Oriented Ontology), as both orientations, respectively, argue for a recognition of a vibrant sense-making agency of matter and for thinking that does away with privileging specifically human ways of interacting with reality. More importantly, these discourses often rely on visual arts and artistic projects or interventions as important means to make their point and to illustrate the ‘non-representable’.

The multi-year international project ‘Illuminating the Non-Representable’ (IN-R) sought to consider the breadth of possibilities in contemporary illustration practice. A question was how, in an ever-more global context, illustration might sensitively communicate concepts of ‘the other’ – meaning persons who do not share heritage or characteristics of the perceived audience or illustrators themselves. With growing AI image generation in 2022, new questions arose regarding types of AI images users were prompting and whether resulting images perpetuate bias inherited through machine learning that is trained on databases already proven to encode bias. This article shares an analysis of a sampling of AI-generated images in response to those questions and includes expert opinions on the benefits and limits of AI creativity, ethical issues related to plagiarism and the unauthorized scraping of copyrighted works into training databases, as well as more generally on the erosion of professional practice that generative AI portends.