Journal of Illustration - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2015

This article discusses a Kerala archive of periodical magazines (1900–2012), an Indian region’s approach to the print-picture practices of periodical magazines within the context of twentieth-century literate media. It outlines a few characteristic contexts of the Malayali reader using his unarticulated flip side, the Malayali viewer. This is an image-rich story of a range of print-picture genres, a visual field of literary illustrators, cartoonists, graphic authors, calligraphic title and film poster designers and photo-featurists as they have culturally functioned in the mindscapes of a reading/looking class. The literary illustrators among them bear the problematic title of ‘aesthetic viewing’ in an ephemeral domain. Their story is presented on the basis of an extensive archival research into discreet cultural hegemony and patriarchy in this region.

Over the last few years ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘heritage’ have become key words in creative commissioning. These terms are generally invoked with an abundancy of good intentions, but little critical reflection. In this article the author uses a commission of hers as an example to unpick some of the unquestioned assumptions and interests that tend to underpin these projects. The manifold determinants, including bureaucratic, legislative, financial, political and art-historical factors, to these types of commissions are conceptualized as a ‘forcefield’, an area of contradictory values, aims and objectives that the author has to navigate. The article combines critical analysis, project report and personal reflection. It describes the author’s efforts to arrive at a satisfactory subject position and project outcome in relation to the conceptual complexities she encounters.

This article proposes the existence of nomadic illustrations – single images that are repeatedly repurposed and recontextualized. News photographs, stock illustration and photography have been used like this for some time; one stock photograph might illustrate the covers of two different novels; a news photograph may be used by different newspapers to support different arguments. Due to the ease with which images are appropriated online, however, this is no longer solely the province of professionally made images, and when illustrations do migrate they are being reused in a wider range of contexts. By giving examples of nomadic illustrations and tracing their movements between contexts, this article will consider the way in which certain images become associated with particular narratives and look at what might be causing some illustrations to move while others remain stationary.

This paper explores the storytelling potential of direct address within illustration as moments where fictional characters look out from their still-image worlds, whether picture-book, graphic novel or comic, into ours. It will consider the possibility of creating fictional worlds by employing direct address to generate narrative in the real time and space of the reader/viewer. This approach parallels Brecht’s idea of ‘showing showing’, where his actors break through the ‘fourth wall’: the audience constantly aware they are watching a play; the structure of their experience laid bare. It will explore showing showing, from an illustration perspective, where the reader/viewer of the sequence of illustrations is not only aware that they are being watched by that which they are watching, but to propose that it is possible to construct a story in the reader’s space.

In 2011 I travelled to three of the ‘Seven Sister’ states of old Assam – Nagaland, Meghalaya and Assam. My journey to this remote and politically sensitive region, bordering Chinese occupied Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar, was prompted by my father’s experiences in the region during World War II in the Burma Campaign and brought into sharp relief ongoing themes in my work, the impact the past has on the present, the relationship of time and place, identity and memory and the transcultural experiences caused by war, colonization and migration. The drawings I made on location, the objects I collected and the notes and photographs I took formed the basis of the book work: NAGALAND: Borders, Boundaries, Belonging. When making the finished work the material quality of the object and the processes by which it was made become very important. The historical resonance of the medium and the time-consuming nature of the process reflect the embedding of form and idea, and paid homage to the material culture of the Naga hill tribes. The bookwork was hand-bound, handset and printed by letterpress. Some spreads were printed in six colours and the book took over a year to produce. I see my practice as echoing that of generations of Lady travellers: embracing the need to journey, be in a liminal space, to have a plan but not be afraid to divert from it. To be alone, take a sketchbook and make images is, for me, the definition of the itinerant illustrator; one who travels widely in geographic space, visual forms and ideas, in order to get lost and find the unlooked for.