Journal of Illustration - 1-2: Education and Illustration: Methods, Models and Paradigms, Dec 2022

Yimin Qiao, Eleanor Wemyss, Caitlin Kiely and Yuzhen Cai discuss their practices in terms of methodology, adaption and the ongoing process of research-based illustration. Through four different practices they outline the tools that are needed in order to place their illustration practice into this space that joins both illustration and research together. The article is divided into three sections ‘being’, ‘doing’, ‘showing’; providing an overarching structure to their ever evolving journey into the world of illustration research practice. Drawing upon ideas of instinct, adaptation and rigour they begin to draw out similarities that carry through all four of their practices, referencing where illustration has been and where their practices are now. They discuss the openness of site as a frame for subject, borrowed technologies and moving outside of the boundaries of traditional illustrative practices. Formed on Padlet and talked about over video calls the process of the article mirrors that of their experience of being a student in a pandemic. This article like their practices is seen as an ongoing investigation into illustration research practice.

This article is on education and emancipation in working-class culture, examining the use of illustrative language (particularly working-class dialect), as a tool to generate higher (or at least wider) educational exchange. Taking the form of a play script, or as an imagined sequel to Willy Russell’s play Educating Rita ([1980] 1991), this article utilizes the easily digestible format of conversation to explore and illustrate Mikhail Bahktin’s complex ideas on dialogism, and the ideological pedagogical position of Jacques Rancière’s novel The Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1989] 1999). We see Rita become academically educated, and as the narrative develops, the idea of what is meant when we say the word ‘culture’ is constantly challenged. Through exploring social culture in working-class communities, this narrative examines how a ‘lack’ of academic awareness has the potential to lead to a social state of intellectual undress: one that disarms and excites information exchange.

This article defines and explores a set of methodologies for image-making that can be labelled as queer, based on concepts from queer and feminist theorists such as Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz or Donna Haraway. In order to do so, it builds on the author’s own artistic practice and lived experience and references the work of various artists within the fields of visual and performative arts. Amongst others, it discusses the conceptual frames of queer failure, drag as assemblage and utopian world-building and the ways in which they exist as artistic methodologies specifically within the field of image-making and illustration.

The illustrator and storyteller Hayfaa Chalabi writes and draws about what kind of design the Migration Board uses to visualize the asylum process. She tells about her own asylum experience and the roles that refugees are forced into. The work becomes a place for memory and history writing where Chalabi tries to understand how to document a process that is prohibited to be documented by the person undergoing it. How and why is the same emotion, such as fear, expressed and processed differently depending on one’s possibilities or impossibilities? This essay therefore aims to explore the tool of illustrative storytelling to challenge governmental restrictions faced by refugee narratives in Sweden. This exploration is done through the study of stereotypes that stigmatize the refugee’s identity. The figure of the refugee is often shaped by the visual representation one consumes via mass media and the words one hears in political debates and social discourse. Refugees are often portrayed as immigrants and nothing but immigrants, faceless victims on news and often de-named suffering people drowning in some ocean. This portrayal makes the humanity of the refugee invisible. A human who has a face, a name, a past, a story beyond his/her refugee story and most importantly an identity and rights.

This article outlines a form of practice formed on BA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, called method illustration. It alludes to an embodiment of experience and understanding before or during the production of illustration in relation to a topic or theme, challenging the expectation of illustration always ending on an image. It plays on the term method acting, which is built on techniques from the Stanislavski System and contemporized. The article includes examples of students work and how this practice can be applied.

This article elucidates the journey of the author as an illustrator and educator in the Indian art education landscape, pivoted around the case study of the project called ‘Kalakarm Curriculum’. The author enquires how these roles guide her decisions to develop a distributable resource that can make art education possible in the classroom. A vital part of the process is the primary research conducted at government and low-income private schools in Delhi, India, which provides the necessary constraints to limit the scope of the large issue of art education in India into a workable brief. The project is anchored around the aspirations and challenges of educators who teach different subjects to different age groups, mapped through conversations, observations and the method of workshops. Illustration is used to document the project, communicate its intention, as a process to make meaning and to create the resource that can equip educators to be able to achieve art in education. The end of the project is education – a particular imagination of art education – to make it accessible and transferrable first from the author to the educators and then from the educator to the learners.

In this article, I introduce the device of close reading in historical academic contexts through to contemporary queer-theoretical thought and open this up to illustration research and practice. Illustration seeks to capture the paradox of the representable and the unseen; this puts an emphasis on illustration as elucidating. For this reason, its historical origins in illumination remain core to how the subject is taught. However, if we are asking illustrators to illuminate and offer clarity on a subject, should we also ask what is being concealed? It is my intention to explore how illustration methods have the capacity to bring overlooked histories to the fore and consider what an illustrative close reading practice may offer as a visual historicizing technique.

Sensory experiences build our worlds, yet in illustration as a practice and subject we often focus so much on the visual stimuli and materiality around us to inform our image-making. Why have we not focused on mediating our range of senses to form a supercharged version of our image-making tools? We live in a time and world that can often be an assault on the senses. But how are these informed and what purpose do they serve in education to help communicate ideas in illustration practices? How can senses be subverted to rejuvenate creative processes? How do senses inform our identity, our memories, nostalgia and in turn, our creative practices? This article is an attempt to explore these questions through examples in Jhinuk Sarkar’s research and practice as an educator and illustrator.

This article will examine the critical potential of illustration practice through an examination of a BA stage project in which illustration was utilized alongside historical research to present both a subjective reading and empathetic critical analysis of a historical piece of fiction. It will look more closely at how both can interact with the idea of the archive to unpick or to challenge existing narratives. I will use my project The Yellow Wallpaper: An Illustrated Reader as a framework for this discussion. It is this practice-based project that sparked this initial line of enquiry and first influenced my thinking about the ways illustration can be a force for critical analysis.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is problematic as it is ‘intangible and not yet fixed in any medium’ (Ivey), however, it opens new possibilities for illustrators to shape and form its intangibility. This article explores the role of illustration in preserving disappearing culture, with reference to my recent project, Tamnarok: The Record of Tamna. This project aims to investigate illustration as both a research method and an artistic mode of disseminating knowledge of endangered cultural heritage, specifically with case studies around female free divers Jeju haenyeo and the distinctive language Jejueo in South Korea. Positioning illustration as a participatory and creative practice for communicating, understanding, facilitating and disseminating lived experience, this article proposes that illustration is an effective way of processing and manifesting ICH.