Journal of Illustration - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019

This article reflects on the research exhibition Decriminalising Ornament: The Pleasures of Pattern held in the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge in November 2018 in conjunction with the International Illustration Research Conference of the same name. It considers the role of ornament and decoration in the exhibited works and through this the essential presence of the decorative within illustration.

Key is Lars Spuybroek's concept of sympathy, which he develops based on a premodern understanding of ornamentation. In response to Spuybroek's exploration of this concept, this article seeks to extend the notion of sympathy as an essential presence within illustration. Sympathy indicates a human-material relationship not just between the illustrator and the creative materials, but also in the readers connection with this decorative act in the reproduced illustration.

This article examines the development and use of vocabularies of shapes constructed using geometric principles as a basis for ornamental pattern design. Through a combination of digital fabrication techniques and printmaking, I have developed a process for freely exploring geometric ornamentation based on compatible vocabularies of shapes. The process highlights the correlation between the use of these vocabularies and language as a medium of expression. It can also provide an insight into how the universality of the visual expression of mathematical concepts helps us perceive the nature of the world around us.

Contemporary illustration is infatuated with texture. The imperfections of analogue processes and signs of physical decay, which were once incidental, or even irritating, are now highly sought after and frequently replicated in order to provide an ornamental layer to contemporary digital illustration. Nicholas Stevenson is an illustrator who uses texture this way. His visual language centres around analogue textures that are digitally applied from an ever-growing library of scanned surfaces: taken from worn book jackets, watermarked paper and ink smudges. This visual essay explores this topic through Nicholas's illustrations in dialogue with Gabrielle's written, critical commentary. Drawing on Mark Fisher's ideas about hauntology in twenty-first-century western culture, and Jean Baudrillard's simulacra, we intend to explore the latent effects of the ornamental application of analogue texture in digital illustration, with Nicholas Stevenson's work taking the role of both example and co-contributor.

This article considers the book form itself as an ornamental object. The binding, paper and ink appeal to the senses and all add to experience of the reader. The future is a place of e-books, online publications and Instagram posts, and yet this arguably makes the carefully considered design of the book form even more important in the physical books that we do chose to view. The study examines a series of examples, drawing from artists' books, pop-up books and mainstream publishing. The work draws strongly on the collection of pop-up books at the National Library of Scotland and the artists' book collection at Edinburgh College of Art, looking at both historical and contemporary works. Initially exploring how the form of the book itself can visually communicate a narrative, the study goes on reflect on the emotion associated with opening a pop-up book, as if in the presence of a theatrical production, made more extreme by the embellishments employed. The place of the book form within a digital world is considered and, finally, the emergence of decorative books in the form of colouring books related to mindfulness.

A wounded city can yield both sites of affect and relic-like objects. The vestiges of Plymouth's blitzed past is inscribed within the pattern and patina of place. This inscription can become overlooked with the passage of time and the fast movement of people through cityscape. By slow looking, stretching a glance into an encounter, witness marks have opportunity to communicate and temporally suture the urban landscape.

In this paper, I unravel the terms 'decoration' and 'ornamentation' through the lens of trauma studies and present occurrences of disrepair as worthy of consideration. I put forward how damage can behave as decoration and why such illustrative terminology is empathetic to the structures decorated by it. Focusing on a selection of ceramics damaged by the aerial bombardment, I explore the ways these artefacts speak to the present through their scars and how they are mimetic of their wounded city. Through a practice-based Ph.D., I employ illustration as a historiographic arts practice and attempt to unlock other ways of knowing which are always already at work within a city's fragments and disregarded sites.

This article argues for the use of decorative signwriting as both ornamental and communicative. This examination will be twofold: first, a series of images of twentieth century signwriting in the fairground industry will be offered to this argument: all signwriting is purposefully applied, as decoration, in order to communicate, but unpicking the visual styles will unveil the hidden meanings, expanding the communicative intentions. Secondly, works of signwriting produced and installed as an archive as illustrated space will be dissected to expand on the argument being made. The archive as illustrated space is a framework being theoretically structured and then applied in practice within my Ph.D. enquiry. It advances the theories and workings of both the archive and artistic archive: the space facilitates the collation of dubious and disputed narratives, alongside archival fragments: told through communicative signwriting, it demands the participation of the viewer in its installation. Using the methodology of this practice-led research will contribute to confirming how the application of a visual language to signwriting enables the production of works that are both ornamental and communicative.

This argument has been formed, primarily, due to my informed fairground position: embedded within fairground heritage my upbringing has established an appreciation for its rich history, which is reflected in my practice, which blends traditional signwriting and illustrative storytelling. This informed fairground position, combined with my Ph.D. enquiry, enriches the analysis and understanding of the practice-led research within the realm of this article: offering a valuable opportunity to not only comment on the historical works presented, but also to showcase an exploration of how to apply this visual production to contemporary, installation situations.

Part of an ongoing research project to interpret linguistic grammar visually, this essay presents initial experiments to visualize rhetorical patterns in English sentences. Creative contextualization is offered with reference to earlier visual forms that were treated as a kind of language. A certain strand in Modernism – in particular that running through the Bauhaus, which used abstract devices as a foundational design syntax – paved the way for post-war picture books to activate the narrative potential of simple coloured shapes; and, again, avant-garde musical scores from the 1950s onwards used exploratory graphic notations to instigate expressive new treatments of sound. My own visualizations are playful in spirit but posit a serious idea that grammar works by means of deep aesthetic tendencies. My case studies – featuring a model user and a model abuser of English – flag up common patterns in typical sentence constructions under seven descriptive labels. Ultimately the essay suggests that Illustration might flourish at the level of the sentence, the basic unit of meaning within word-based language and, in very simple terms, the expression of a thought. Ornamenting the rhythm and flow of how a sentence operates is one means of 'seeing' a voice lending shape to thought at a detailed level.

Textile patterns, whether printed, knitted, woven or embroidered, tend to be inspired by and created in response to the visual environment. The soundscape is a significant component of the embodied multisensory landscape – from the buzz of fluorescent tube lights in an office to the intermittent roar of water flowing in a river; no space is ever silent (Schafer 1994). Attunement to environmental soundscape provides inspiration in music, art and, in this case, the creation of textile patterns, challenging the visual bias of pattern creation. In this ongoing study, the audio sources from bird song to horses galloping are visualized into spectrograms forming contemporary landscape-inspired textile patterns. Spectrograms are a type of visualization of an audio spectrum where the intensity and multiple frequencies are displayed across time, rather than simply the pitch and amplitude of the sound source. These spectrograms are then transformed into textile patterns through the interaction between a maker's existing skill set and digital software. By sharing this process with a group of textile practitioners, this sound-to-visual approach forms the foundation of a co-created textile pattern design. In this way, the process of soundscape-inspired design challenges the visual bias of existing textile patterns, contributing to the sensory ethnography of the contemporary landscape. Here we explore key insights that emerged from the project – experimenting, collaborating and disrupting – through the imagery of process and pattern making, as well as, through the narratives and reflections of the practitioners, presenting a collective visual encounter. In the end, the project opens dialogues to collaboratively understand and relate to the local soundscape as a source of inspiration for pattern making, and begins to formalize a design narrative based on the non-visual environment.

Enacting the subject of ornamentation through unfolding a deteriorating repetition within its reading, this paper is presented as a performative text. Illuminating rather than telling, key focus within the paper draws on: detail and curiosity as necessities during both the making process and audiences viewing of ornamentation; the hidden and overlooked seen in domestic pattern and the rich potential for subversion; the whole versus the single, how looking and making can be akin to fractals; the un-repeating repeat or difference of the same as seen through visual rhythm disrupted by the glitch; how repetition of text transforms it into the decorative; transformation through repetition connected to the joys of labour and its associate cousins of repeated action, making, boredom, rhythm, muscle memory, sex.

This visual essay appraises the film charts (shooting diagrams) used in the production of The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series in 2016. The film charts are a surprising key element arising from this period of film practice, being as they were a pragmatic part of the preproduction planning. However, through analysis of my films after production the charts have become a major source of visual thinking, notation, documentation and a significant aid to reflection on the work carried out. The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series is a collection of 16mm animation landscape films that use a single frame production technique to translate Guernsey knitting patterns into film, and in doing so set up a structural relationship between that of a knitted stitch and a frame of film – drawing out analogies between both forms of production. In this visual essay the charts' roles will be considered in the translation of the Guernsey knitting patterns in terms of preproduction visualization of the knitting patterns; notation documentation during the pro-filmic event; and retrospectively as a record of processes and production. To do it will illuminate the film practice relationship to mistakes, and the location as the editing system process that is a key aspect of the film series processes – wherein gesture, landscape and film are 'knitted together' in the film as a material object.