Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2012

As researchers in illustration continue to develop what some call ‘illustration theory’, the need for a meta-perspective grows. What is illustration research? Who is doing it? Why are we doing it, and how? What opportunities, needs and pitfalls exist? Focussing on activity in The United States and Canada, this article offers a conceptual model of ‘illustration research’ in which three domains of current activity are surveyed: that of practitioners, that of connoisseurs and that of scholars. Strengths and weaknesses of each area are discussed, and suggestions regarding purpose and needs are made. A reference list representing work from the three domains follows.

It is with the materiality of language, or Materia Prima, that this article concerns itself, reflecting upon the ‘surface’ of text, as an image in its own right. The oral or spoken/auditory/acoustic qualities of language have long been held to be aesthetically central to literature and poetry. The philosopher Richard Shusterman describes this phenomenon as a lack of attention to those instances when the ‘visible is visible’, this phrase relying upon a distinction between two meanings of the word ‘visible’. The first suggests being ‘able to be seen’, while the second suggests the ‘conspicuous’ or ‘strikingly manifest’ aspect(s) of the seen (or passive and active modes of the visible). The printed surface of language, where the ‘visible is visible’, has traditionally been viewed as irrelevant in philosophical accounts of language, from Plato to Wittgenstein, where, frequently, language is broken down only into ‘the sound aspect’ and ‘the meaning aspect’. However, this article will argue that the knowledge that artists, designers, typographers and illustrators bring is that the material word is a crucial partner in the production of meaning, by engaging with those practitioners whose work interfaces with these concerns, both directly and indirectly.

This article discusses the book Phantom Settlements by Catrin Morgan and Mireille Fauchon. Phantom Settlements contains illustrated interviews with the artists Ryan Gander, Jamie Shovlin and Tom McCarthy in which they discuss the role of authenticity and deception in their work. The article begins by giving an overview of the book’s five chapters, each of which is illustrated and authored in a distinct style. It then outlines the concepts governing the style of each chapter and looks at the use of footnotes and appendices in reinforcing the book’s repeating structure. It also considers the contribution made by the design of the book to the discussion it contains. The article concludes by making the case for Phantom Settlements as a piece of authorial illustration.

Bhimayana (2010) is a pictorial biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891–1956), a very important Indian leader whose struggles and writings about uprooting the caste system from the Indian society have been of crucial relevance for contemporary struggles by dalits and adivasis (tribals) in India. It is in this spirit of Ambedkar’s encounter to the dominant Brahmanical hegemonic forces that the title of the pictorial text under consideration, ‘Bhimayana’, gains relevance – that is, in providing a counter-epic to the dominant Brahmanical, nationalist epic of the Ramayana; it subverts the commonsensical nationalist narrative of what constitutes an epic. The visual narrations in Bhimayana by the well-known Gondi (tribal) artists Subhash Vyam and Durgabai Vyam, have come to challenge the conventional way of storytelling in a sequential format like that of a graphic text along with challenging the way in which image-word texts are generally read. The visual and the verbal arrangements in Bhimayana have shared a different strategy of storytelling which defies marking this text into categories such as ‘comic book’ or ‘graphic novel’. It has brought Gond art to a medium of mass media but only as an exclusive commodity. This paper attempts to address the problems of image-word relationship in the text – Bhimayana, by scrutinizing the challenging reading patterns it has called for. The discussion ranges from inquiries in art-historical studies, to more contemporary aspects of visual culture and mass media in everyday life like graphic novels, comics etc.

The depiction of place and environment can play a key role in predominately visual texts such as children’s picturebooks, sometimes taking on the status of a character in its own right. Representations of place, literal or implicit, provide the stage or backdrop on or before which the actors perform. The article examines this often unnoticed element of pictorial sequential design and its role in anchoring and propelling visual narrative. The article draws on Katherina Manolessou’s practice-based Ph.D. research and Professor Martin Salisbury’s experience as her supervisor, along with Professor Morag Styles of the University of Cambridge. The article identifies a range of approaches to scene-setting and explores different cultural traditions and approaches to the representation of space and environment, pictorial, schematic and implied. The focus of this article is primarily on process, on the making of a picturebook as distinct from being an analysis of the finished product.

This article explores the use of allegory within the practice of designing Pakistani cinema’s ‘Lollywood billboards’. It is highlighted that as a visual medium these billboards articulate a visual narrative that has rhetorical qualities, decoded by the Pakistani viewer as clearly as spoken words. It is suggested that even though the purpose of the production of these billboards is purely commercial, their power of communication as visual narratives reflecting an indigenous social and cultural ideology cannot be denied. Within a strict definition these cinema billboards are not allegorical, when one story is used to parallel another to illuminate it, whereas the billboards illustrate the story of the film. However, the complex shared visual language and the visual rhetoric of the billboards, by suggesting the narrative of the film and inviting interpretation, in effect form something that is more than illustration and approaches allegory. This study is based on semiotic and multimodal literacy theory, where semiotics is the study of signs (Saussure) and multimodality in texts is ‘ensembles of modes brought together to realize particular meanings’. This study investigates production, distribution and consumption of Lollywood billboards and positions them as an allegorical literacy practice – one that involves reading and writing, albeit with a visual medium other than traditional print. Rooted in New Literacy Studies, a branch of scholarship that explores reading and writing primarily as social practices and cultural forms, this study understands literacy in relation to the larger social and cultural contexts in which the reading of media texts exists in the Pakistani visual culture. My research finds that the meanings and purposes that guide these cinema billboards as media text both contest and reflect facets of a social and cultural ideology that can help privilege the public as viewer by engaging with an established yet developing visual grammar – a visual rhetoric.

This paper is an attempt to highlight the possibilities of redirecting content by form; how formal composition can help indicate the illustrations content and further extend its meaning.