Illustration and Heritage 9781350296022, 1350296023

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Illustration and Heritage
What is Heritage?
Authenticity and Heritage
The Expanded Field of Illustration
Heritage and Illustration
Chapter 2. Illustration and Historical Voices
A Tool for Empathy
Constructing Voice
Illustration Practitioner as Subject
Illustration Practitioner as Director
Illustration Practitioner as Inventor
A Choral Voice
Chapter 3. Illustration and Historical Collections
Institutional Critique
Working with Archives
The Residency
Illustration Practitioner as Historian
Illustration Practitioner as Assembler
Illustration Practitioner as Guide
Chapter 4. Illustration and Historical Landscapes
Field Work
Illustration Practitioner and the Transient Landscape
Illustration Practitioner and the Virtual Landscape
Future Sites of Practice
Conclusion
Interview Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements

Citation preview

Illustration and Heritage

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The Bloomsbury Research in Illustration Series welcomes topics from the full remit of illustration ­— from materiality, practice and technologies, through to history, theory and beyond. The series is designed to bring together global research within illustration to form a cohesive body of literature unique to this discipline. The series is the place for scholars, researchers, students and authors to turn to for high quality discussion of contemporary and historical issues within illustration, providing a base from which to further disseminate discourse within the field. Dr Rachel Emily Taylor is an illustrator, researcher, and educator. She is from North Queensland, Australia, grew up in the North East of England, and is currently based in London. Taylor is the Course Leader of BA (Hons) Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Illustration. Taylor has worked with numerous UK-based heritage sites, including: the Foundling Museum, the Horniman Museum, National Maritime Museum, the Wellcome Collection, the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the Barnados Archive, Bowes Museum, Bishops’ House, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

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Taylor Illustration and Heritage Rachel Emily Taylor Illustration and Heritage Rachel Emily Taylor Illustration and Heritage

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Bloomsbury, 2024 Rachel Emily Taylor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 192 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: work-form All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-9417-2 PB: 978-1-3502-9602-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-9418-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-9419-6 Series: Bloomsbury Research in Illustration Typeset by work-form Typeset in Edition by Elias Hanzer

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Introduction

9

Chapter 1 Illustration and Heritage What is Heritage? Authenticity and Heritage The Expanded Field of Illustration Heritage and Illustration

19 19 22 24 25

Chapter 2 Illustration and Historical Voices A Tool for Empathy Constructing Voice Illustration Practitioner as Subject Illustration Practitioner as Director Illustration Practitioner as Inventor A Choral Voice

39 48 51 51 58 62 70

Chapter 3 Illustration and Historical Collections Institutional Critique Working with Archives The Residency Illustration Practitioner as Historian Illustration Practitioner as Assembler Illustration Practitioner as Guide

89 91 94 96 100 108 120

Chapter 4 Illustration and Historical Landscapes Field Work Illustration Practitioner and the Transient Landscape Illustration Practitioner and the Virtual Landscape Future Sites of Practice

135 137 142 148 157

Conclusion

175

Interview Glossary

180

Bibliography

183

Index

190

Acknowledgements

192

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Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Introduction Illustration_&_Heritage_29_6_23.indd 7

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Introduction

Figure i. Tamsin Nagel, Hazelnut Token, 2022.

Engraved coins, swatches of fabric, items of jewellery, handwritten poems, small, everyday items such as a thimble and a hazelnut: I face a collection of small, hand-sized objects exhibited behind glass, tilting upwards, floating. I read the captions that tell me that they are ‘foundling tokens’. The foundling tokens are exhibited in the Foundling Museum1 in London, and form part of the permanent collection, which tells the Foundling Hospital history. From 1741, upon entry of their child to the Foundling Hospital, a mother (or, in rare cases, a father) was asked to ‘affix on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the children may be known thereafter if necessary’.2 The tokens were part of the admissions process to the hospital and, later, could be used as an identifier if a family member returned to reclaim their child. Each tokenwas attached to a billet that recorded information about the child, but it would not be opened unless the child was reclaimed. In 1858, many years after the foundlings had been left in the care of the hospital, the Governors opened the billets containing the tokens, and several hundred were put on display at the South Kensington Museum (which is now the Victoria and Albert Museum).3 The exhibition ‘fuelled the public’s desire for the new and curious’ 4 and it was an opportunity to raise awareness of the hospital in the hope that it would bring more donations to the charity. But this act ‘orphaned’ the tokens, detaching them from Introduction

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Figure ii. The Foundling Tokens, The Foundling Museum, London. Photographed by GG Archard.

their history. Twenty-first-century researchers have been striving to repair the severed link between tokens and children, but work is still ongoing. Some tokens may never be matched to the story of their child and the family who left them in the care of the hospital. Looking at the display in the museum, I am drawn to the spaces in-between the tokens: the gap between the object and its shadow (an illusion created by plastic supports and spotlights in the museum display cabinet), and the distance between myself, the glass, and the object. I recall J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.5 In particular, the part when Peter loses his shadow,6 but, once found, Wendy stitches it back on to his feet. While housed in this display, the tokens are detached from their shadows and their individual owners; displayed in a grid format, like a collection of butterflies that have been pinned down, they become one rather than many. Butterfly collecting was popular in the Victorian age, and it was at this time that the foundling tokens were first exhibited. But, unlike the butterflies, the tokens are unified by their original purpose, rather than by any similarity in their material qualities (see Figure ii). Beside the display of the tokens is a small LCD screen that presents a selection of digital captions. By swiping sideways, you can view the tokens (enlarged, with detail) while reading their accompanying narratives. I hesitate over an image of a ring with a red heart-shaped stone, inscribed with 10

Introduction

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the words ‘qui me neglige me perd’. The words would have been pressed against the skin: ‘he who neglects me loses me’. It is miniature, to be worn on a child’s finger. According to the caption, this token was linked to Harriet Littleton, who was renamed Harriott Woodhall on admission, and was later recorded as ‘discharged’. The museum text suggests that the child might have been reclaimed, or, what researchers propose is more likely, she had a disability7 and could not find an apprenticeship.8 ‘Harriet’s fate is yet to be discovered’, the caption states.9 At that moment, I questioned if illustration practice could be used as a tool to close the gap between the objects and their stories, and this experience in the museum was the starting point for my doctoral research,10 which I began in 2014. Instinctively, I asked myself, could I repair what had been broken, like Wendy mending Peter Pan’s shadow? Could illustration practice be a tool to imaginatively mend this link? Although I discovered through making that I was not capable of doing so, I find these questions are often an underlying theme in an illustration practitioner’s response to heritage — they often place themselves within the narrative, rather than merely spectating as it unfolds. It is this practice-based research that lays the foundations of this book. I sought to explore whether illustration practice might give a voice to historical figures. In particular, the under-represented voice of the foundling child – children like Harriott Woodhall. This has since led me to question how such methods and inquiries into voice and representation can be adopted and/or subverted by an illustration practitioner. Consider the hazelnut11 in the museum display. When encased in the cabinet, placed alongside a caption, and held within a collection, it is surrounded by a narrative and perceived to have value. It is preserved and cared for by conservators and curators. It has a very different purpose now than it did in the eighteenth century. Without these layers of meaning, it would just be a hazelnut. I question the tangibility of the hazelnut and the intangibility of the story that encompasses it, and how both act collectively to communicate a story of the past; and this act is part of the process of heritage. Heritage can be considered as a story, like the narrative of the hazelnut (who owned it, what became of them, and its journey into the collection), but it can also be one where knowledge and power become important factors. As Stuart Hall stated, We should think of The Heritage as a discursive practice. It is one of the ways in which the nation slowly constructs for itself a sort of collective social memory. Just as individuals and families construct their identities by ‘storying’ the various random incidents and contingent turning points of their lives into a single, coherent, narrative, so nations construct identities by selectively binding their chosen high points and memorable achievements into an unfolding ‘national story’.12 Introduction

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The opening chapter, ‘Illustration and Heritage’, will examine the definitions of heritage and how comparisons can be drawn with illustration practice, asking, what are the similar functions of heritage and illustration? Illustration has a natural place in heritage - making, it is a method that can be used to communicate narratives of the past, and this chapter will set the foundation for this discussion. The following questions are each a starting point for a chapter in this book: ↦ How can an illustrator give voice to a historical person? ↦ How can an illustrator disrupt an archive or museum? ↦ How can an illustrator represent a historical landscape or site ? This book explores the different methods that illustrators can adopt when working with heritage. It also includes examples of illustration practice, positioned alongside works from other disciplines, such as art and literature, to contextualise illustration within a wider field of creative practitioners working with heritage. This is more prominent in the early chapters, as they form a reference point. In chapter two, ‘Illustration and the Historical Voice’, the terms subject, author, and inventor are employed to allow for an exploration of roles that an illustrator may adopt when retelling and constructing historical narratives in their work. I do not argue these are the only roles, there are overlaps and nuances, but these provide a starting point from which to unpick the different approaches illustrators can take in their practice, and to examine where they situate themselves in their work. In recognition of the fact that no one person can speak for all illustrators engaged with heritage-making, woven throughout this book are extracts from interviews with practitioners and academics that took place between April and October 2022 (see ‘Interview Glossary’, page 181). The scriptstyle of these transcripts has been purposefully used to draw attention to the layering of voices in the book, playfully mirroring the multiple discourses in the heritage industry. I have chosen to keep these conversations distinct from my own voice in the writing so that these discursive moments act as interruptions, thereby allowing space for reflection. Due to my ethnicity and nationality (White, 13 British) and my affiliated academic Institution (Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London), I cannot avoid the fact that this book will be perceived as UKcentric, nor do I wish to deny my positionality. 14 The UK has a history of colonialism, culminating in the British Empire, and the act of gathering international examples for a scattered overview could itself be perceived as a colonial act, as well as tokenistic. I have chosen each case study for how it allows an argument to unfold — in depth — rather than aiming to provide a global overview of practitioners who are working with heritage. The projects discussed in this book are contemporary (to 2022) and it is 12

Introduction

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to be expected that this area of practice will continue to grow and shift as illustration practitioners continue to engage with heritage. In short, this book aims to initiate a foundation discussion that illustrators can continue to expand.

1. ‘Foundling’ is a historic term used to describe children and babies that have been abandoned, but are discovered and cared for by people other than their family. 2. Caro Howell, The Foundling Museum: An Introduction (Berkshire: Lamport Gilbert Ltd., 2014), p.19. 3. In the late-nineteenth century, John Brownlow, the Secretary of the Foundling Hospital, highlighted the existence of the tokens to the governors. Researchers Janette Bright and Gillian Clark assume that Brownlow did this as he was concerned over the welfare of the current foundlings, and because he had a strong interest in the institution, particularly as he had been a foundling himself. 4. Janette Bright and Gillian Clark, An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum (London: The Foundling Museum, 2011), p.6–7. 5. James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911). 6. Peter Pan appeared in my PhD thesis, as he was an orphan – a foundling – in literature. The thesis opened with the quote, ‘“I wasn’t crying about mothers,” he [Peter Pan] said rather indignantly. “I was crying because I couldn’t get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn’t crying.”’ Throughout the study, I was sometimes asked, ‘But who is the historical child?’ and I would answer that it was the foundling children of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. It was only while finishing this book that I recalled that I myself had played Peter Pan on stage when I was sixteen years old. 7. Bright and Clark, An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum, p.19. 8. Foundling children as young as seven years old were apprenticed in the 1700s. Girls were apprenticed to seamstresses and milliners, but the majority were domestic servants. Boys became servicemen and joined the armed forces. This was seen as a better life than what was offered to ‘pauper children’. 9. Bright and Clark, An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum, p.19. 10. Rachel Emily Taylor, Heritage as Process: Constructing th­e Historical Child’s Voice Through Art Practice (doctoral thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2018). The project was part of the Heritage Consortium 2014 cohort of students, which included training in heritage research and practice at the University of Hull. The research was fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 11. Janette Bright and Gillian Cark write about the hazelnut, ‘we have not been able to find any record of a hazelnut in the billets, but there is one record that states a child was left with a stone. So could this be in fact [listed in the records as] a fruit stone?’ An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum, p.8. 12. Stuart Hall, ‘Whose Heritage? Un-settling the Heritage, Re-imaging the Post-Nation’, Third Text, 13, 49, (1999), 3-13, (p. 5). 13. In this book, the decision has been made to capitalise racial identities, based on: Kwame Antony Appiah, ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’, The Atlantic, June 2020 [accessed 5 September 2022]. Introduction

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The NABJ (National Association of Black Journalists) style guide recommends that ‘whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalised within the proper context, including White and Brown’, NABJ Statement on Capitalizing Black and Other Racial Identifiers, June 2020

[accessed 5 September 2022]. 14. ‘Positionality’ is a term from social sciences that refers to a researcher’s understanding of themselves, who they are, and what they bring to their research. Positionality affects every phase of the research process.

14

Introduction

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and Heritage Illustration and Heritage Illustration and Heritage Illustration and Heritage Illustration and Heritage Illustration and Heritage

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Chapter 1 Illustration and Heritage What is Heritage? Heritage is an act that we do to preserve the past, it takes place in the present, and it is for the future. It is a ‘process’1 that is not inert.2 We engage with it, rework it, appropriate it. It is part of the way identities are constructed.3 We can use etymology to unpick the term; ‘heritage’ is derived from the old French eritage, meaning ‘that which may be inherited’, and from the Latin word for ‘heir’, heres, a person entitled to property or rank on the predecessor’s death. When constructing and conserving heritage, the aim is to preserve it for future generations. The child becomes a symbolic figure of the future, but these future children are not real at all and are an imagined future based on our present day understanding of what that might be. Heritage reveals what we perceive to have value and how we want to be remembered by the things that we leave behind. Through the heritage process, we are assembling future worlds.4 Heritage is synonymous with manifestations of the past.5 It can be thought of as both tangible and intangible. Tangible heritage includes artefacts, archaeological sites, monuments — objects we can touch. Intangible heritage consists of folklore, skills, stories, rituals — things that do not necessarily have a physical presence. In the heritage industry,6 more value is often perceived to be placed on tangible objects, as they can be easier to preserve and house in collections, archives, and museums. Heritage is a comparatively new academic discipline that arose in the 1980s, but it is not a new phenomenon. In ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents’, David Harvey writes that it is a human condition to preserve the past7 and it is a ‘selective portrayal contingent on present-day requirements, thereby reflecting a sense of nostalgia towards the heritage heroes of yesteryear’. 8 It could be argued that heritage reflects nostalgia, which can be perceived as a yearning to forefront ‘imperial self-esteem’ 9 or to preserve a ‘lost community’. 10 Nostalgia alludes to longing for how things were, but with a fondness. The word can be broken down into nost- meaning ‘homecoming’ and -algia, ‘pain’. Susan Stewart defines nostalgia in the following way: Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack […] longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin.11

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Stewart’s writing on nostalgia can shed a light upon the motivations of the illustrator or artist working with heritage, and on nostalgia itself as the motivation behind a search to uncover the past through practice. Film theorist Rachel Moore views nostalgia as a space of in-betweenness, where the past and present are brought together.12 Heritage practice13 also seeks to bring the two together by making the past accessible in the present, but there are differences between the two: Moore regards the process in nostalgia as inflammatory,14 but this does not necessarily exist in heritage discourse. In the mid-nineteenth century, nostalgia became institutionalised in foundations and museums.15 In her essay ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’, Svetlana Boym discusses how the industrialisation of the mid-nineteenth century fuelled the need for institutions, such as national and provincial museums, as if ‘the ritual of commemoration could help to patch up the irreversibility of time’.16 She writes about how heritage and nostalgia are intertwined, and suggests that nostalgia can be used to critique heritage and illuminate its mechanisms17. Is there heritage without nostalgia? I would argue that nostalgia can be a driving force behind heritage, but it is not the same process. Rodney Harrison, heritage academic and principal investigator for Heritage Futures (2015–2019) at University College London (UCL), states that heritage is a ‘creative engagement with the past in the present [that] focuses our attention on our ability to take an active and informed role in the production of our own future’.18 It is this process of creative engagement that separates heritage from history. Heritage is not history. History seeks truth. Heritage ‘uses historical traces and tells historical tales’19 that can exaggerate and exclude. A historian aims to reduce bias in their retelling of the past, whereas heritage can enforce it. Heritage is representational; it depicts recreations and reproductions of the past, of societies and cultures. Heritage is performative; it can involve re-enactment, rituals, actors, and audiences.20 In Uses of Heritage, Laurajane Smith writes that heritage is an ‘act of communication’.21 She uses an example of giving her daughter her grandmother’s necklace — a family heirloom — and that the real sense of heritage is in the act of passing on and receiving the memories and the stories that encompass the necklace. We then use and shape these stories to make sense of who we are and who we want to be. Smith describes the necklace as a ‘prop’ for heritage-making. She places importance on the intangibility of heritage and does not dismiss the tangible, but ‘deprivileges’22 it. The places, sites, and objects that are selected as heritage are deemed as ‘significant’ and ‘meaningful’ by experts. The past is labelled as ‘heritage’ when it is selected to become part of the conservation and management of the heritage industries. These choices in themselves are a cultural process, and this curation of material treasures 23 reflects contemporary cultural values, social debates, and aspirations, rather than those of the past.24 In the museum, these artefacts 20

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are the subject of museological interpretation, and heritage practitioners form a dialogue with an artefact to aid the communication of history (examples being museum captions, guides, and tours). This entails curating a version of history that has been constructed with the fragments 25 that remain of the past. Caitlin Desilvey suggests that if we frame heritage as a verb, which is ‘a continual achievement rather than a fixed object’,26 then this way of thinking might help us to explore the act of heritage. There are many different occupational roles within the heritage industry: working in museums, in archives, with rare book collections, in education, events, or archaeology, or with historic buildings. Harrison describes heritage as part of a ‘regime of care’,27 drawing on the words to curate and assemble. He divides the different fields of practice in heritage-making as follows: ↦ Categorising (identifying, documenting, nominating, listing, recovering, enumerating) ↦ Curating (collecting, selecting, attributing value) ↦ Conserving (caring, preserving, storing, archiving, managing) ↦ Communicating (using, interpreting, exhibiting) 28 These defined fields of practice can be applied to the illustrator’s role in heritage-making. But what about the heritage-making that a visitor produces? The acts of remembering, engaging, performing, experiencing? Visitors and non-professionals can be included in discussions, alongside experts. The fields identified by Harrison are industry-focused, with trained persons undertaking the action, but how do we see the role of people and non-experts as part of the heritage process? Heritage is a political act. Museums have a history of colonialism, and still ‘retain two basic competencies’ left over from colonial times – ‘they collect and they exhibit’.29 In the present day, discussions are ongoing over repatriation of museum artefacts and requests for human remains to be laid to rest (Parthenon Marbles, Benin Bronzes, the Hottentot Venus, Ramses Mummy, Nefertiti’s Bust, the Louvre’s Egyptian Frescos, to name a few). The publication of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies manifesto (2012) sought to challenge industry practitioners to ‘invite the active participation of people and communities who to date have been marginalised in the creation and management of “heritage”.’ 30 Heritage is a way of seeing the past — it is a ‘gaze’ 31 — and when marginalised communities are included, those that have been gazed upon can gaze back, and interact with the process. Heritage is a discourse. Heritage is a form of knowledge, expertise, and power relations that are imbedded in language. Smith developed the term ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’ (or, simply, AHD in heritage literature) Illustration and Heritage

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to describe the self-referential discourse used in professional heritage practices. Authorised Heritage Discourse can privilege certain narratives linked to nationhood, can naturalise 32 cultural and social experience, and places undue importance on ‘things’. An example of this is museum captions, which may include ‘statements by artists or critics, but their voice is the singular, disembodied voice of the museum’. 33 This is ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’.

Authenticity and Heritage In museum and heritage communication, people from history are sometimes presented as ‘characters’.34 Individual biography and a singularnarrative is employed to represent multiple experiences, in the hopes of aiding universal communication. As a strategy, it runs the risk of creating stereotypes that elevate certain voices over others. This form of representation is a mechanism of Authorised Heritage Discourse. An example is the Family in Wartime exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (2012–2019). The exhibition opened with an accurate miniature model of the Allpress family home, thus positioning the family as characters in a doll’s house. Audio recordings of the Allpress family, reminiscing about their childhood, are installed alongside contemporaneous household items, although these objects are not actually the family’s possessions. The decision to display these artefacts alongside the Allpress oral histories aims to present one family as a ‘representation’ of the experience of many other London-based families during the Blitz. This was the intention of the museum, which describes the exhibition as allowing visitors to ‘discover how ordinary Londoners faced challenges of life at home during the Second World War through the story of the Allpress family’.35 Although there is a charm to using one family to humanise the display, in the hope that it is relatable for visitors, the presentation could also be perceived as reductive and problematic, because it uses the singular experience of a White family to represent the multiple. Such a portrayal could create a distorted version of the past that leads to a misinterpretation of history. Arguably, this is an example of how heritage reflects nostalgia — no Allpress family members die during the Blitz, and the voice recordings portray an idyllic sense of the past, one of community. English Heritage, a non-departmental body of the British Government, is a current example of the employment of Authorised Heritage Discourse. Their core ‘Vision and Values’ are listed on their website,36 opening with the subheading ‘Authenticity’ and with an aim to ‘separate fact from fiction’. Presented as such, the task of separating fact from fiction37 appears to be binary, however there is a space between the two; one example being oral history, when a memory or statement might not be accurate, but still has value in the analysis of a historical time. On this English Heritage web page, the subheading ‘Authenticity’ is positioned alongside a photograph 22

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of a man who is taking part in historical re-enactment. Based on current research on heritage tourism, authenticity is a useful goal, because visitors expect to have an ‘authentic’ experience during their visit.38 Yet, on first appearances, English Heritage appears to be blurring these boundaries of fact and fiction by replaying history with actors. Rather than separating fact and fiction, one hangs in front of the other — like a ‘scrim drop’39 in front of the cyclorama on stage, its appearance shifting from opaque to translucent based on theatre lights — the two are overlaid. The term authenticity needs addressing, then particularly as we are considering illustration in relation to heritage, and an illustration does not have to be truthful or factually accurate.40 Deriving from the Greek authentikos, meaning ‘genuine’, the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary describes the meaning of ‘authenticity’ as ‘the quality of being genuine or true’. But these words can contradict each other; an object that is authentic can be genuine or true, however, if it is ‘true’ it does not have to be the genuine item. Authenticity can also refer to an intangible response to an object, not just the tangible object itself. In tourism studies, Tom Selwyn defines the different strands in authenticity as ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ and uses these as frameworks for analysis.41 Hot authenticity describes the intangible, such as emotional responses. Cool authenticity refers to the tangible, such as artefacts and sites. These terms have been applied to performance at heritage sites. Theatre, like curation and illustration, is a medium through which heritage can be communicated, and is a space in which the contradictions of authenticity can be seen. It entails both a material reality in the form of the literal presence of a performer, and a degree of artifice in the mimetic presentation. The interplay between these two aspects of theatre can generate emotional experiences that are ‘authentic’, in that they organically arise, rather than being artificially imposed. Jenny Kidd uses Selwyn’s terms of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ as a framework for analysis when discussing performances 42 at heritage sites. She writes, ‘Engaging audiences in dialogue through performance can engender a healthy questioning of cultural authority, an understanding of the knottiness of the past, and result in less superficial analysis of the “authentic”.’ 43 These two modes of authenticity ­— hot and cool — can ‘exist in tension with each other’.44 An inauthentic constructed act might trigger an authentic organic experience, like an actor portraying a character. Authenticity is a paradox. The heritage site and artefacts — examples of ‘cool’ authenticity — are key to the authentic experience described by English Heritage, as they ‘seek to be true to the story of the places and artefacts that we look after and present’.45 In their statement, there is no mention of person, either present or absent. The use of actors in re-enactment, or the fictional representation of a historical person does not detract from English Heritage’s aim to ‘separate fact from fiction’,46 as it is the use of materiality that maintains their statement’s view of an authentic experience. We might start to imagine this situation with the metaphor of Illustration and Heritage

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the stage, with the historical building forming the set and the artefacts as the props ; actors can perform as understudies for people from the past, but this does not distract from the factual, ‘cool’ authenticity of a historical tableaux.

The Expanded Field of Illustration Illustration is a practice that has been hard to define. Often, it relies on the relationship between text and image to communicate a narrative, which may be fiction or non-fiction. It has been described as ‘chimera-like’,47 ‘difficult to distinguish’,48 and ‘has rarely been subject to deep academic scrutiny’,49 and, as a result, ‘the critical discourse is limited’.50 In my own teaching and practice, I have often described it as ‘slippery’, as it is hard to pin down. When discussing illustration, academics often start by examining the origins of the word to unpick the discipline, noting that it stems from the Latin illustrare, a verb, referring to activities such as ‘illuminating, and also encircling and traversing’.51 To ‘illustrate’ suggests an action or process, rather than just the final work, and this perspective can open up the discipline. I propose that illustration can be an action (verb) as well as an outcome (noun).52 When considered in this way, we can view illustration as an act that is not defined by a medium. Illustration can be a method employed within other practices, such as painting and drawing. It is a ‘fugitive’ 53 process that spills into other fields and often goes undetected. What’s more, it can be difficult to distinguish illustration from both graphic design and fine art, as it can reasonably reside in both, as these disciplines can both act illustratively.54 In general, illustration can be perceived as having two strands of practice: commercial and authorial. Commercially, it is a brief-led practice, often seen as representational images that have been made in relation to a text for a commercial application. The other strand, authorial practice, is often self-directed, and exists without the influence of a client. It is this latter strand that can add the undefinable quality to illustration and those who explore this expanded notion of illustration often adopt alternative titles such as artist, designer, and/or creative, rather than illustrator. The slippery nature of illustration stems from the fact that it can become a process, method, or action that occurs within other disciplines. For example, an artist, performer, or designer can use the functions of illustration in their work, without being a self-defined illustrator. In my own practice and research, my doctoral study was classified by the university as ‘fine art’, but its research aims belonged to illustration, questioning communication and representation. A working model of how illustration performs is outlined in Rachel Gannon and Mireille Fauchon’s book Illustration Research Methods, which they term ‘Principles of Illustration’,55 and they break down the ‘principles’, ‘common strategies’, ‘behaviours’, 24

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‘tools and instruments’ that are ‘commonly operational within illustrative works regardless of their final form’.56 Using this template, we can begin to explore how the same strategies and tools are used by practitioners positioned outside of the discipline of illustration. In A Taxonomy of Deception, Catrin Morgan writes : It is useful to redefine illustration as a communication tool, one which may be used by anyone, rather than a discipline only practiced by illustrators. This in no way devalues the expertise that illustrators have: it simply opens up a broader field within which their expertise might be applied. Photographs, texts, diagrams, stains on paper, appropriated images and reproductions of works of art may all serve as illustrations although they are not often discussed in those terms.57

Using Morgan’s statement, we can perceive a hierarchy in the discipline, created by terminology, language, and expertise. I would encourage readers to view illustration with this understanding. Building on these ideas, and to further explore the idea of illustration as both a noun and a verb, for the sake of the following discussion, I propose we consider it as such: Illustration (noun) is a tangible outcome. It can be a commercial practice, but it is not limited to this. The work can rely on a relationship with a client or agent. The work is often considered as an application in publishing, advertising, packaging. But it can also be self-directed and autonomous. Illustrative (verb) is an intangible process that can take place within multiple disciplines and practices. An artwork, design, performance, image, or object can act illustratively. It is a process that occurs between the viewer/reader and the object/image, whether intended or not.

Heritage and Illustration We can consider heritage in relationship to illustration, exploring the overlaps, sympathies, and environments where they both exist together. In semantic terms, it has been argued that ‘heritage is without definition’ 58 and it presents itself as it splits in two – resulting in a duality, both tangible and intangible – when it is applied. This can be compared to illustration, which itself can be perceived as both a noun (an illustration, tangible) and a verb (the illustrative process, intangible). Like heritage, illustration can be regarded not only as an object, but also as the story that surrounds an object. If we recall Smith’s metaphor of her grandmother’s necklace, ‘heritage’ is the story that encompasses the object; the necklace itself is not Illustration and Heritage

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heritage but is an aide-mémoire that embodies a narrative, which has a specific audience. Can we frame illustration using the same metaphor? When gathering the material for this book, I raised these ideas with Darryl Clifton, the Illustration Programme Director at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and what follows are some extracts from our conversation.

Practitioner Interview : Darryl Clifton rachel  emily  taylor 

Heritage is both tangible and intangible.There are similarities between how it functions and the process of illustration.

darryl  clifton  

That is an interesting connection. I am interested in the dematerialisation of practice. A while ago, at an Illustration Research conference in Birmingham, I raised the following question: ‘What would it mean if an illustrator did not produce an “end” product? What might it mean for us to try and surface, value, and leverage the processes that are involved in the production of an illustration, rather than the illustration product itself?’ There was no response to the question at the time. But now, having been through a pandemic, and a de facto dematerialisation, where we happily meet one another virtually and access work more frequently online than in its physical form, our position has shifted. Having this conversation now, for instance, with sound and visuals — our process, in other words — being recorded, means we are technologically and sociologically in a very different space. I think we are now able to engage with the idea that illustrators bring a set of tacit skills that are embedded in processes that they undertake in the act of production more readily. Illustrators are engaged in processes of research and development, the formulation of ideas, iteration, and wide-ranging methods that borrow from a variety of discipline-based approaches. At its best, there is an artful weaving together of multiple methods. I think this is what is interesting about illustration, its capacity to hop from one disciplinary field to another. It’s a bit rapacious in that regard, magpie-like, you know? Jumping into all of these different knowledge spaces and scavenging what it can, in order to bring together ways of working that effectively address the problem. It is interesting, from an academic perspective. The value of illustration as a practice-led process has been of interest to me for a long time. It has essentially formed my thinking

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about illustration education and, I hope, helped to shape a collective philosophy on the Illustration Programme at Camberwell [College of Arts, London].

In both illustration and heritage, importance has been placed on the tangible over the intangible, but there is ‘value’ in both, and there are overlaps between how both disciplines use this categorisation. There may also be a comparison to be made between expertise in both practices. Returning to Morgan’s statement from A Taxonomy of Deception, she proposes illustration to be a practice that can be employed by anyone, rather than a discipline reserved only for ‘experts’, and this can also be applied to the heritage sector. Although it is labelled, named, and defined by industry specialists, thus becoming part of Authorised Heritage Discourse, heritage is not always practiced by experts and, even though these ‘inexpert’ moments can be overlooked, they are still heritage. Museums assemble and curate stories with fragments of the past. These selected objects — ceramic pots, metal coins, or stone sculptures, for example — are placed alongside museum captions or audio guides. The curation relies on the relationship between text and image, which communicates a story that enables us to imagine a specific past, as constructed by the institution. This is comparable to how illustrations can function. Illustrators can also gather fragments (be it photographs, testimonies, or archival documentation) that they then synthesise and place adjacent to one another to reconstruct the past. This inclusion of artefacts can add to the ‘cool’ authenticity of the illustrative work. Illustration and heritage do not always depict a truthful representation of history. Morgan writes that, often, illustration is expected to have ‘a duty to the truth of the text’ however, this is not always the case, as it does not need to be ‘mimetic, submissive, or even honest in order for it to be enlightening’.59 If we bear this in mind, then an illustration might not be honest when depicting historical moments. Instead, illustration acts like heritage and tells a historical story. Illustration and heritage can illuminate historical narratives. When working with history, I regard the illustrator with the metaphor of a ‘prism’, one that light shines through, but which can never be fully removed from the work as it forms a refraction of another’s voice or story. The idea of refraction leads us to question the positionality and moral implications of the illustrator. Their work is not authorless and the histories they are adapting should be treated with care. Illustration and heritage can erase experiences. An illustrator can choose to highlight certain narratives and voices in their work. Comparable to forms of empathy, these chosen narratives can be perceived as ‘biased’, ‘short-sighted’,60 and can lead to over-identification. Both heritage and illustration can favour the narrative of the individual over the many and create a ‘spotlight effect’.61 In theatre, a spotlight can highlight one person and leave the remainder of the stage in darkness, but, if a number of Illustration and Heritage

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spotlights are arranged to combine multiple beams, the light can also flood the stage so that the full performance is visible. The diameter of the beam can be used as a metaphor for the illustrator’s practice and what effect it can have. Recalling the exhibition Family at Wartime, in contemporary heritage practice, there is a tendency to focus on the individual experience, rather than that of the many, since this is how stories are often told. As the novelist Ursula Le Guin observes, ‘The only way to the truly collective, to the image that is alive and meaningful in all of us, seems to be through the truly personal.’ 62 If highlighting certain narratives means that other stories are at risk of being forgotten, should an illustrator use their practice to bring less well-known histories to light? Both illustration and heritage are entwined with notions of representation, of showing and portraying. Representation is not a presence but a represence,63 such as a translation or interpretation, which is never truly objective. There are issues between the notions of ‘speaking for’ and ‘portraying’ another in both practices. It is assumed that illustration relies on the idea that we can make things visible and depict them, but, when working with heritage, it can also be used to highlight absences and act as a negative space. Even now, as I am writing this book, there are ongoing debates regarding the moral and ethical responsibility of institutions. Heritage practitioners and institutions are bound by national laws and international conventions. The International Council of Museums, American Alliance of Museums, and the Museums Association have published texts that outline ethical guidelines for museums.64 As parallels are drawn between both fields, I would argue that the same considerations are applied to illustration when representing heritage and the past.

Practitioner Interview: Darryl Clifton rachel   emily   taylor  

What might the moral implications be for an illustrator working with other people’s stories and narratives?

darryl   clifton  

Moral frameworks and ethics are highly subjective. They come from people’s lived experiences and, although we have collective rules for how we might want to live and work with one another, we know that our behaviours are bound by cultural frameworks. At the same time, it appears to be down to the individual to decide what they think is morally right, so I don’t know if there is insight that can be gained from an idea of a collective moral or ethical framework, in terms of its relationship to illustration. If we are talking about what the potential implications are then, if you’re working as an illustrator with a piece of text, I think it is important to have an understanding of the context

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that the piece of text was produced in. You may be working with something that, in the contemporary environment, uses language that is inflammatory or problematic, but that doesn’t mean we should be dismissing or cancelling it. I think we must endeavour to understand the context in which things are being made. You don’t want to produce a piece of work that causes harm, offense or adds to the burden of people who already carry the weight of inequality through lived experience. So, being aware of the broader implications of the work that you’re producing, its politics, its relationship to power, and its capacity to change people’s behaviour is really important. Being aware of the work’s potential to reproduce inequality is critical when considering morality. rachel  emily  taylor  

I think this is such an important question, as heritage is often used to establish national identities and assert power. Heritage can present an edited version of history. That is why morality and ethics should be considered when working with histories in the present day.

darryl   clifton  

Yes. You're right, of course. I mean, history – the word itself – is problematic. It is gendered, and talks about a ‘somebody’ who, at some point, had the capacity to tell their story about particular events and phenomena. Events which were undoubtedly much more complicated and diverse than one representation can account for. And so, in my opinion, you're absolutely right to say that. The idea that heritage is establishing a cultural framework, or lens, through which we view past events is an interesting one. It may be doing that, but, at the same time, it ought to be actively challenging, questioning, and folding in conventional historical accounts. And, therefore, the question might be how might you reconcile these contradictions? I know your research has been about raising up those voices that were previously unheard, and that seems to fulfil a moral obligation. To create as many perspectives of a historical event as possible. The story becomes less definite the more voices you include. That leads to a much more complicated and, possibly, ambiguous space. Perhaps, then, the ethical imperative for illustrators is to guide and support people through ambiguous moral spaces?

If the illustrator’s purpose is to guide and support people through ‘ambiguous moral spaces’, then how might we approach this task? I also asked myself, as a writer, how might I approach the ideas covered in this book? Illustration and Heritage

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This is a book about heritage: the subject is vast, political, and changeable; it varies from country to country, from generation to generation. It is a discourse that is layered with multiple voices. While writing, I have been meeting with various illustration practitioners to allow for a range of different perspectives and case studies to emerge throughout this book. When considering how best to approach the integration of the case studies, I met with Cecilia Hei Mee Flumé, an illustrator who uses her work to explore her personal experience as an international adoptee and is currently studying for a PhD in Visual Communication at the University of Gothenburg and Konstfack, University of Arts and Crafts (2020–24). Her illustration practice responds to heritage by exploring the relationship between two countries, Sweden and Korea, and her heritage stories from each (see Figure 1.1).

Practitioner Interview: Cecilia Hei Mee Flumé rachel  emily  taylor  

From the position of the illustrator, and one who might be working with histories, how might we tell another person’s story?

cecilia   hei   mee   flumé  

Working with other people’s stories may seem terrifying and sometimes impossible because of the implied responsibility that comes with representing and representation. Questions of ‘Am I allowed?’, ‘Can I?’, or ‘Is it correct?’ seem to frequently accompany this type of work. I believe these questions are appropriate and should be considered, but not stop us from telling stories that we believe are important. Instead of asking the question ‘can I?’, try asking ‘how can I?’ This is a good start when navigating the ethical decisions of telling someone else's story, as is communicating ‘I’m telling someone else’s story’, or maybe ‘I’m experiencing’, ‘reading’, ‘mediating’, ‘translating’ … as opposed to ‘I’m telling the story’. It’s a way of working transparently about your position.

An illustrator may or may not be working with heritage that is their own. Rather than standing back, and being unwilling to tell another’s story, one should do so — but be fully transparent and aware of their positionality. The 2022 symposium Colouring In: The Past, 65 included a keynote presentation from Jaleen Grove, Assistant Professor of Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. In her talk, she questioned, ‘Is it possible to illustrate the history of White privilege and to honour cultural interaaction without reinscribing settler dominance?’ She explored this through a discussion of unfinished illustration work, titled Time Pieces. At the end of the presentation, the chair, Rachel Gannon, asked, ‘Whose stories are 30

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Figure 1.1. Cecilia Hei Mee Flumé, Omma & Me, 2019.

we allowed to work with? What about when you don’t have permission? How do we tell stories that aren’t our own?’ Grove answered, ‘This is why I turn the lens on myself.’ 66 Walter Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus (1920), as ‘the angel of history’ (see Figure 1.2). The image (and its description) is how I propose we consider the role of the illustrator when working with heritage, and the pitfalls that might challenge them: An angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.67 

The image suggests a struggle against the linear order of time and, perhaps, history itself. The angel is ‘caught’ between the past and future, and Illustration and Heritage

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there is a push and pull to either side. The angel is still moving forward, but also looks back towards what has been. When considered a part of the heritage process, the illustrator navigates multiple states of time — as the angel does — and there is a balance to be made between them. A historical narrative can help us to understand our present day and our journey towards the future. The angel’s face, ‘turned toward the past’, and movement forward, can help us to understand the illustrator’s metaphorical position in relation to time. The illustrator working with history could be considered as a protector or messenger, one that guides people ‘through ambiguous moral spaces’. 68

Figure 1.2. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Photographed by Elie Posner. Copyright: The Israel Museum

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1. David Harvey, ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7, 4, (2010), pp.319–38, p.320. 2. John Turnbridge and Gregory Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p.6. 3. Barbara Bender, ‘Introduction: Landscape, Meaning and Action’, in Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Bender (Oxford: Berg, 1993), p.3. 4. Rodney Harrison, Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural (London: UCL Press, 2020). 5.Jenny Kidd, ‘Performing the Knowing Archive: Heritage, Performance and Authenticity’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 17, 1, (2011), pp.22–35, p.25. 6. I am using this term throughout the book, rather than ‘heritage sector’, to be provocative and to tie the discussion to ideas of economy, organisations, services. The ‘heritage industry’ was a term coined by Robert Hewinson in the 1980s, and it was used to refer to the heritage sector in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was also used by Stuart Hall to describe the heritage sector in his keynote speech at the national conference ‘Whose Heritage? The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Britain’s Living Heritage’ in November 1999. 7. David Harvey, ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7, 4, (2010), pp.319–38, p.320. 8. Harvey, ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents’, p.337. 9. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.6. 10.David McCrone et al., Scotland the Brand. The Making of Scottish Heritage (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995), p.11. 11. Susan Stuart, On Longing (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p.23. 12. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton [nostalgia] (London: Afterall Books, 2006). 13. ‘Practice’ is an application of an idea or method, so when tied to heritage, it relates to how heritage is applied. I recommend the reader refers to Rodney Harrison et al, Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (London: UCL Press, 2020). 14. Rachel Moore writes of the ‘heat, ‘fire’, ‘hotplates’, and ‘flames’ in Hollis Frampton’s film (nostalgia) that occur when two things are brought together, causing ‘friction’, and uses these metaphors to discuss the functions of nostalgia. 15. Svetlana Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’, Hedgehog Review, 9, 2, (2007), pp.7–18. 16. Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’, p.13. 17. Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’, pp.7–18. 18. Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (London: Routledge, 2013), p.229. 19. David Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History & Memory, 10, 1 (1998), pp.5–24, p.7–8. 20. Michael Haldrup and Jørgen Ole Bœrenholdt, ‘Heritage as Performance’, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015), pp.52–68. 21. Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), p.2. 22. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p.3. 23. Items in museum, gallery, and archive collections. 24. Harvey, ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents’, p.320. 25. I am referring to artefacts, recordings, memory, and testimony. Illustration and Heritage

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26. Caitlin Desilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p.9 27. Rodney Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene”, Heritage & Society, 8, 1, (2005), pp.24–42, p.35. 28. Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, p.36. 29. Susan Ashley, ‘First Nations on View: Canadian Museums and Hybrid Representations of Culture’, eTopia (2005), pp.31–40, p.32. 30. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell, Association of Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto (2012). [accessed 13 November 2022]. 31. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Society (London: Sage, 1990). 32. ‘Naturalise’ is a term used by heritage academics to describe how Authorised Heritage Discourse neutralises particular cultural frameworks as ‘universal’. 33. Salwa Nashashibi, ‘Visitor Voices in Art Museums: The Visitor-Written Label’, The Journal of Museum Education, 28, 3, (2003), pp.21–5, p.21. 34. The term ‘character’ was used during a panel discussion at the annual Heritage Consortium Conference, held at the Heritage Quay in May 2015. Lisa O’Neil, an Audio-Visual Designer, was advising the team at Hardwick Hall to use Lady Arbella Stuart as a ‘character’ to increase visitor numbers. 35. Imperial War Museum, A Family In Wartime [accessed August 2015]. Note: this webpage is no longer active. 36. English Heritage, Our Vision and Values [accessed 24 June 2022]. 37. English Heritage, Our Vision and Values. 38. Jenny Kidd, ‘Performing the Knowing archive: Heritage Performance and Authenticity’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 17, 1 (2011), pp.22–35. 39. A ‘scrim drop’ is used on a stage in theatre. Scrims are often lit and can either be translucent or opaque. The light not only illuminates the scrim but also anything behind it, creating incredible effects. I chose this metaphor, rather than a filter over a camera lens, to keep this particular discussion rooted in performance and theatre. 40. Catrin Morgan, A Taxonomy of Deception (doctoral thesis, Royal College of Art, 2014). 41. Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism (Chichester: Wiley, 1996). 42. In Jenny Kidd’s article, ‘Performing the Knowing Archive’, ‘heritage performance’ includes ‘first and third person live (most costumed) interpretation, gallery performance, scripted monologies, and even large-scale living history events’. See: Kidd, ‘Performing the Knowing Archive’, p.24. 43. Kidd, Performing the Knowing Archive, p.32. 44. Erik Cohen and Scott Cohen, ‘Authentication: Hot and Cool’, Annals of Tourism Research, 39, 3 (2010), pp.1295–1314, p.1305. 45. Smith and Campbell, Association of Critical Heritage Studies 2012 Manifesto. 46. English Heritage, Our Vision and Values. 47. Rachel Gannon and Mirielle Fauchon (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), Illustration Research Methods, p.14. 48. Catrin Morgan, A Taxonomy of Deception, p.18. 49. Journal of Illustration, Aims and Scope [accessed 10 January 2023]. 34

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50. Stephanie Black, Illumination through Illustration (doctoral thesis, Kingston School of Art, 2014), p.5. 51. Black, Illumination through Illustration, p.5. 52. When I was appointed as Course Leader of BA (hons) Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, I proposed that illustration should be viewed as both a noun and a verb in my first lecture, What Is Illustration? (September 2019) – and it was a view held by a number of the academic team on the Illustration Programme prior to my appointment. 53. Catrin Morgan, keynote, ‘Bodies in Spaces’, Illustration Research Methods Symposium, Kingston University (February 2021). 54. This is a view that I have witnessed in the art school, but also in the humanities, literature, and media. 55. Gannon and Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, p.16. 56. Gannon and Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, pp.16-17. 57. Morgan, A Taxonomy of Deception, p.21. 58. Robert Hewinson, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (North Yorkshire: Methuen Publishing, 1987), p. 31. 59. Morgan, A Taxonomy of Deception, p.18. 60. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (London: Bodley Head, 2006), p.16. 61. Thomas Gilovich et al., ‘The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 2, (2000), pp.211–222. 62. Ursula Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays of Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Putnam, 1979) p.74. 63. At the 2020 Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference, I gave a collaborative presentation with Leah Fusco, titled ‘Re’-: Methods of Illustration Practice in Heritage, and the paper explored these ideas, including how the practice could be framed as a ‘re-turn, re-visit, re-imagine, re-voice, re-assemble, re-presentation, re-enactment’. 64. The Museums Association, ‘Code of Ethics for Museums’

[accessed 20 December 2022]. 65. The symposium Colouring In: The Past was hosted by the Camberwell Chelsea and Wimbledon (CCW) Design School, University of the Arts London in December 2022. The event was organised by Stephanie Black and Luise Vormittag, as part of their collaborative research project Colouring In, which examines the impact of illustration on themes of critical importance and global debates, such as: nature, the city, truth, and the past. 66. Jaleen Grove, keynote, ‘The Lacuna’s Calling: a Graphic Reckoning with History’, Colouring In: The Past, University of the Arts London (November 2022). 67. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp.257-8. [Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 1940.] 68. Darryl Clifton, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022).

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Illustration and Historical Voices Illustration and Historical Voices Illustration and Historical Voices Illustration and Historical Voices

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Chapter 2 Illustration and Historical Voices Illustration practice can be used to represent historical people and to communicate the stories of their lives. It can shine a light on histories and make them accessible to an audience, allowing previously unheard narratives and marginalised voices to be heard. When exploring the representation of historical people in my own practice, I have come to use the word voice (to give voice to), rather than image (to make visible) to describe the process. This stemmed from work undertaken at the Foundling Museum in London, where I observed that the historical children of the Foundling Hospital had not yet been given a voice in the museum (at the time of the research, in 2014–18). In this chapter I will explore what it means to give voice to historical subjects in illustration practice, and the different positions an illustrator may adopt in this regard. Voice can be physiological, philosophical, and political. In historical research, the physical voice of historical people is often absent. One cannot speak to nor hear people from the past but, through letters, diaries, and writing from a particular time, one may imagine their voices. Since the invention of recording, some voices have been captured. Researchers have even been able to recover some voices from the past ‘traced in soot’,1 notably the voice of Édouard-Léon Scott singing Au Clair de la Lune on a phonautogram 2 in 1860. Often, historians aim to give a voice to historical figures who have been mis- or under-represented. It is a term used in creative writing to refer to the voice of the author, character, and/or the narrator, and each of these is layered in the creation of a unified narrative. Furthermore, voice would seem an appropriate term to use when discussing illustration practice and heritage, as heritage is often described as a discourse — Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (see pages 21-22), a cultural discourse, or a material discourse. A voice is linked to its carrier and their breath.3 Historically, time, sound, air, and soul were often fused as one.4 We take air into our bodies as breath and expel it. The air passes through our vocal cords, which vibrate to cause phonation.5 The voice travels up from within us, passes through our mouths, which performs around it,6 and breaks away from our body as sound waves that compress and rarefract, travelling across space and through a medium (such as air) into the ear of the listener. A voice can be perceived as external: a laugh, a call, a babble, a cry, and so on. A voice can also be internal, such as the hearing of voices during certain forms of psychosis7 or the voice of the superego.8 Arguably, the Illustration and Historical Voices

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best-known of all internal voices in philosophy is the Socratic voice: the so-called ‘daemon’ that accompanied Socrates throughout his life. This particular internal voice was externalised in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as an actual embodiment of a voice that you interact with outside of the body. In these stories, the daemon takes on an animal form, visible to oneself and others, incapable of being hidden inside the mind. Voice is tied to ideas of communication, a key aspect of illustration. Our practice can be used to ventriloquise the voice of the past. Metaphorically, a voice can speak through the illustration work and communicate a message or idea. Illustration cannot truly make a historical person reappear, but using voice to discuss the practice of illustration enables us to consider a different kind of visibility — one that is as tangible as it is intangible. In this it has something in common with a ghost, a historical or future person who appears in the present day. The contemporary depiction of a ghost is one that is often translucent, barely visible, wraithlike, intangible. Their appearance is a squint-eyed view of who they were or who they might become. It is interesting, then, to look at the French word for ghost, revenant, which translates to ‘that which comes back’. Ghosts often return to ‘repeat [themselves], again and again’.9 Like the processes of illustration and heritage, the ghost is a re-presence10 — it is a repetition rather than the original presence (see page 28). After Hamlet is visited by his father’s ghost, he exclaims, ‘The time is out of joint.’11 After having a conversation with a spirit, which begins by ‘their return’12 — this phrase was also used by Jacques Derrida for the opening of Specters of Marx, in which he coined the term ‘hauntology’ 13 — an idea that the present is haunted by metaphorical ghosts of lost futures, and how ‘spectres’ of alternative futures can influence current and historical discourse. The ghost can be audible when speaking from the body of someone who is possessed, or through a psychic medium, or — as Konstantin Raudive believed — in sound recordings, such as Electronic Voice Phenomena.14 These ideas could be considered in relation to the representation of historical people through illustration. Although Illustration cannot bring historical people back to life and make them fully visible, they could be thought to speak through our work.15 Yet, this historical voice can still seem strangely elusive. To further inquire into this, we must go deeper into what we really mean by using this word voice. To give voice is to be able to express an emotion or opinion, but it also carries an implication of authenticity. Issues arise when multiple voices are grouped together and referred to as a singular voice.16 Far from giving people more audibility, this can lead to groups being disempowered, as their individual identity is stripped away. Steven Connor questions the power of the choral voice, writing, ‘How is one to speak of the strange and powerful plural-singular that is the choral voice?’17 He proposes the term ‘chorality’ to describe acts of joint vocalisation, and these acts include prayer, children’s games, formalised learning processes, and chants of

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protest. Chorality is a form of ventriloquism where the source is not hidden from view, but rather it ‘gives rise to the fantasy of a collective voice body’.18 Voice can be considered as a silence, and to take away another’s voice is to assert power.19 In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes the absent voice as being a goal of the torturer, and the removal of another’s voice as a display of control.20 If illustration can be thought of as a tool to give voice to the historical person, it can also be used to disempower voices and silence moments from history, regardless of whether this is done intentionally or unintentionally. Disney’s animated interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1989) visualises the loss of voice. In the animation, after a deal is made to change her tail into human legs in exchange for her voice, the mermaid is made mute, and her voice is used by the sea–witch. The mermaid’s displaced voice is depicted as a glowing object that is encased in a seashell. Could this narrative be a metaphor to imagine the voice that has been lost or stolen? As illustrators, we could be perceived as using another’s voice for our own means, like the sea-witch, which could be criticised — an example of this being the public reaction to Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket at the Whitney Biennale in 2016. The painting depicts an image of Emmett Till, a Black American teenager murdered by White racists in 1955. In an open letter, artist Hannah Black called for Open Casket to be destroyed, because it is ‘a painting of a dead African-American boy by a White artist’ who has used ‘Black pain as raw material’.21 In response, Schutz acknowledges that she does not ‘know what it is like to be Black in America, but [that she does] know, what it is like to be a mother’ and her engagement with the image was through ‘empathy with [Emmett Till’s] mother’.22 The reaction to the work demonstrates the problematic nature of representation and appropriation. We need to remind ourselves of the moral and ethical implications tied to our practice. The dead cannot object to their representation. In the representation of historical people, there are moral implications and a duty of care. Care is a word that derives from the Old English caru, meaning ‘concern, ‘anxiety, sorrow, grief, trouble’, from the Proto-Germanic karo, meaning ‘sorrow’, ‘cry’, and stems from the Proto-Indo-European gehr-, meaning to ‘shout or call’. The definition suggests that the caregiver is active and vocal, whereas the care-receiver is silent. The power of care remains situated with the one who is concerned for the other. These discussions are vital to critiquing the illustrator communicating the historical voice, not only in positionality, but in the care that is given and received through the act of representation. We should always question the motives and the version of history that is being portrayed in our illustrations, as it can have an impact on an audience’s interpretation of the past, and their heritage. Further, we need to consider our positionality in relation to the story that is being told.

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Figure 2.1. Rachel Emily Taylor, Foundling Voice [child’s workshop drawing], 2016.

I worked with the Foundling Museum23 with the aim to give voice to the foundling children 24 from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When I began the project,25 these historical children had not yet been given a voice (or a space) in the museum. This was partly due to the absence of historical records and partly due to the lack of separation between the histories of children and the histories of childhood (meaning adults recalling childhood memories, rather than hearing memories from the children themselves). I noticed that it was only the biographies of adults that were represented in the museum — the mothers, the foundling’s masters, hospital governors, donors, or the foundlings as adults — never the biographies of children. At that time, the voice of the historical child had not yet been vocalised in the museum. I searched for testimonies of foundlings in the London Metropolitan Archives. I only found scraps in the old handwriting books, character references, and letters from the foundlings as adults. I questioned if this missing voice was lost? Had it existed? Could it be found? Why had it not been recorded? Between the recited words and controlled penmanship in the handwriting books,26 the only trace of the child is in the little inky fingerprints that occasionally marked a page. Given the historical time of the Foundling Hospital, and how the concept of childhood has changed since then, I began to consider that the child’s voice did not exist then as it does today, as it was not regarded as having any value. When I attempted to give voice to the foundling children, I questioned whether or not this was even possible. How could I, as an adult in the twenty-first century, give voice to a historical child, in my practice? After realising that I could not fulfil my project aims alone, I facilitated workshops with contemporary children,27 with the objective of constructing the historical child’s voice through my practice. I integrated methods from performance into the workshops, drawing on Konstantin Stanislavski’s System28 and Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors29 to support the children in their imagining of a foundling ‘character’, which they then drew and illustrated. The children brought a degree of authenticity in 42

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their material presence in the work. Claire Bishop calls the practice of artists using a ‘nonprofessional’ (the children) to perform a role in their artwork as ‘delegated performance’, which entails a displacement of the artist’s body/identity, and in so doing, the artist is ‘guaranteed authenticity through [the “nonprofessional” performer’s] proximity to the everyday’.30 I considered if the children were blurring the boundaries of the self and the other in their illustrations. I questioned whether the past was a plastic medium with which the children worked, or if the children occupied an imaginative space where all times exist concurrently; an ‘in-between space’,31 where there is a fusion between the child’s self and the imagined past. This might be considered as a multi-time space where the present/ past is not linear but occurring simultaneously.32 Through the workshop sessions, I observed that the children could not always articulate their response through spoken language, and I began to consider that a voice could also be non-verbal. A picture or drawing made by a child could also be thought of as voice — a voice can be an image. We must not lose sight of the fact that the children were asked to imagine another person in these sessions. This person (although based on historical fact) is a work of fiction. The task could be compared to an actor rehearsing to perform a role on a stage. Konstantin Stanislavski’s technique Emotion Memory33 encouraged an actor to apply his/her own memories to their character’s experiences. The actor would reflect these feelings onto their character. Philip Auslander writes that, in Stanislavski’s theatre, the ‘the actor’s self’ is always ‘privileged’ 34 and present during a performance, but both character and actor should ‘fuse completely’.35 Which is not dissimilar to the foundling characters invented by the children, where there was a blurring of self and other, and the foundling character was invented and never existed.

Figure 2.2. Rachel Emily Taylor, Sam's Foundling [child’s workshop drawing], 2016.

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The paintings from the workshops were integrated into an installation, Kept Within the Bounds (2016), which was exhibited at the Foundling Museum (see Figure 2.3). The work explores the underrepresentation of historical foundling children, focusing on their lack of place in the museum. It achieves this by situating the work in the museum’s Picture Gallery, a room that was filled with paintings of important male figures in the hospital’s history, such as the founder Thomas Coram.36 The men are remembered, they have been chosen as important, their portraits have been commissioned, and they are now treasured in the museum collection, but not the children. By positioning the children’s paintings below these works, at the height of a child, the forgotten children can be imagined and are given a re-presence (see Figure 2.4 and 2.5). Kept Within the Bounds illustrates both the class system of the time and how these historical figures have maintained their position of power. The title of the work also plays on this relationship, using words from the Foundling Hospital Committee Minutes from 1761 in reference to the environmental control of the foundlings: ‘The playing ground be further secured to keep them within bounds.’37 They stated, ‘Ye fence proper to confine the children.’ 38

Figure 2.3. Rachel Emily Taylor, Kept Within the Bounds, 2016.

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Figure 2.4. Rachel Emily Taylor, Kept Within the Bounds, 2016.

Figure 2.5. Rachel Emily Taylor, Kept Within the Bounds, 2016.

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Figure 2.6. Rachel Emily Taylor, Foundling Portraits [child’s workshop drawing], 2016.

Figure 2.7. Rachel Emily Taylor, Foundling Portraits [child’s workshop painting], 2016.

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The foundling children stare out of the images created by the contemporary children with wide eyes and closed mouths, as if voiceless (see Figure 2.6 and 2.7). The term ‘pupil’ means both the centre of the eye and also a ‘student’, derived from a late Middle English sense of the word meaning ‘ward’ or ‘orphan’. ‘Pupil’ originates from the Latin pupilla, meaning ‘little girl’, the diminutive of which is pupa, meaning ‘doll’, for the tiny image one sees of oneself reflected in the eye of another. In these paintings, the viewer is not reflected in the children’s eyes. Recall that heritage is a way of seeing the past — a ‘gaze’ 39 (see page 21) — and that the gaze is ‘integral to systems of power’.40 Power is closely entwined with an adult’s relationship with a child. Rachel Holmes and Liz Jones write that a teacher asks children to ‘look at me’ and listen to the lesson as a ‘mechanism of subjection’, but children are also told ‘not to stare’, because it is rude,41 and a look from a child can cause ‘confrontation’.42 In the portraits, the foundling children are ‘seen and not heard’. In the children’s illustrations, the foundlings’ eyes are large and appear to be doubled; in a number of the drawings, the eyes have two irises and, in some cases, two pupils (see Figure 2.6). These double portraits give the impression of being looked at by two people, perhaps the historical and the contemporary child, or perhaps the portraits show an image of the child and their alter ego. Each painting is therefore a portrait of two people: the child-artist and the foundling child they seek to recreate. During the project, I found that I could not reconstruct nor find the historical child’s voice through my practice. The missing voice could not be found, as it did not exist as I anticipated. When the foundlings were alive, the child’s voice did not exist as it does today, since what we regard as childhood and how a voice can be documented has changed over time. Instead, Kept Within the Bounds draws attention to what is lacking, and I built ‘bounds’ to contain negative space, metaphorically representing the absent voice. Kept Within the Bounds shone a spotlight on where the missing voice might be, in a space that is half-built, which allows for an audience to fill in the gaps. When Kept Within the Bounds was exhibited in the Foundling Museum, I listened to what visitors said about the work. A visitor commented on other objects that were included in the installation alongside the paintings (the paint brushes, apron, and so on), remarking that these everyday objects reminded her of her children and ‘pulled on the heartstrings’.43 The mundanity and familiarity of the displayed items allowed visitors to draw on their own experiences of contemporary children (observations of children and memories of their own childhoods) and then relate these to the historical foundlings. Others noted the familiarity of the paintings and that, aesthetically, the images did not pretend to be from the past. In fact, I had not wanted the installation structures to masquerade as historical artefacts: they are contemporary, rather like items from IKEA. This aesthetic design led one viewer to associate Kept Within the Bounds with contemporary news stories of the time, such as the images of Alan Kurdi,44 the drowned Illustration and Historical Voices

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Syrian refugee child found dead on a beach in Turkey in 2015.45 Although this project explored the representation of historical foundling children, it enabled the audience to consider the work in relation to the present and future. Kept Within the Bounds attempted to disrupt notions of Authorised Heritage Discourse in the museum by challenging this presentation of history and by adding a new discourse in relation to the collection. When making this work, I began to consider the position of the illustrator in the heritage process. The illustrator is not outside, nor inside, but between — like Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (see pages 31-32). The work looks back towards the past, but moves forward, allowing for reflections on our future.46

A Tool for Empathy Historical people can be presented as ‘characters’, vehicles for history, and tools for empathy. I have often attended heritage events and talks where real historical people are referred to as a character (see pages 2223).47 The use of the word ‘character’ implies that the person may not be real, as it is so often used to refer to a person in a novel, play, film, or a part played and shaped by an actor. When navigating the lives and histories of others, there is a balance to be made between overwriting another’s experience with your own, and this draws us towards empathy. The history of empathy as a term is complicated. It was introduced into English language in the twentieth century, translated from the German Einfühlung. The German is itself a translation from the Ancient Greek word for ‘passion’, empátheia, and derives from en, ‘in’, and pathos, ‘feeling’. Einfühlung was used to describe an aesthetic experience, such as contemplating a work of art and the viewer’s emotional reaction to a painting. The term was later expanded to include our modern understanding of empathy, which is the ability to understand someone else’s perspective:48 feeling into another. Melanie Klein described empathy as being able to ‘put oneself in another’s shoes’.49 It requires imaginative reconstruction. The shoes may not fit, the surface might feel rough and unfamiliar. The metaphor suggests that one can never lose oneself in the act, one is simply wearing another’s shoes, and one’s own life experiences will influence one’s response. Our perception of someone else’s ‘shoes’ is subject to fashion and current trends socially, politically and culturally, and our contemporary viewpoint might influence our response. Empathy, affect, and emotion were previously not recognised in heritage research, but recently they have been gaining new ground. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell write that ‘empathy is questioned as something that substitutes shallow identification for appropriately rigorous historical understanding’.50 This statement was included in their essay, ‘The Elephant in the Room’, the title of which suggests that empathy is unspoken, wild, and 48

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uncontained in the heritage industry. Historians have been cautious in their use of empathy in the field, noting that the moral sentiments of the present should not be employed in the study of the past.51 In heritage practice, emotion has been described as ‘dangerous’ 52 as it has the potential to create an unstable, rather than balanced, understanding of history. In his book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom outlines different forms of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Bloom describes cognitive empathy as a form of social intelligence, where you can understand that the other is in pain without feeling it, and emotional empathy is ‘the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does’.53 Bloom is morally against this form of emotional empathy, and describes the negative effects as being ‘biased’, ‘short-sighted’, ‘innumerate’, ‘corrosive’, suggesting it can ‘spark violence’.54 Empathy can lead to a marginalised experience being distorted and ‘shaped by perceptions of another that are elite’.55 Using empathy to feel into another risks the other’s erasure when their experience is replaced with one’s own, in the way that the children’s drawings for Kept Within the Bounds blurred the contemporary child and the historical foundling child, so that one over-wrote the other. At the conference Empathies, at the University of Basel in 2017, Jesse Prinz described empathy as a ‘double-edged sword’, as you are at risk of ‘erasing the other and making the other’s pain your own’.56 Empathy is problematic when it leads to over-identification, meaning that the empathiser can claim ownership of another person’s life story. Empathy can lead to bias and favours an individual over a group, which creates a spotlight effect.57 This is one of its failings. It can zoom in and highlight one person’s narrative but leave others in the dark. The risk of spotlighting — highlighting and eclipsing — inheres with the practice of illustration, which can also shine a light and ‘illuminate’ preferred narratives and ‘eclipse’ the rest. We must remember: we can stand in another person’s shoes but we do not stand in their skin. Like Cecilia Flumé, whose illustration practice responds to heritage through her personal experience (see page 30), the artist Danh Vo also approaches history through the personal, and he enables his own biographical connections to unify objects in his installations. His works Slip of the Tongue (2015) and Mother Tongue (2015) enable his own biographical connections to unify historical objects, and this is achieved through the accompanying pamphlet that includes elaborate captions that are laden with personal meaning and backstories. In the installation Mother Tongue, Vo includes the letter written by Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard to his father on the eve of his own execution (see figure 2.8). The letter in the artwork is not the original document, but a handwritten copy that was made by Vo’s own father. The artist and his father did not translate or understand the French contained in the original letter. To Vo, the copied letter symbolises his personal relationship with his father, their escape from Vietnam, and their conversion to Catholicism.58 This is an example of how a historical text could be used to shine a light on contemporary struggles, in this case, Illustration and Historical Voices

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one of displacement and communication across cultures. But is it also an example of Vo over-identifying with a historical narrative, perhaps, through his empathy with Vénard?

Figure 2.8. Danh Vo, 2.2.1861 [handwritten Letter by Phung Vo], 2009. Courtesy of Danh Vo and the Mariam Goodman Gallery. Copyright: Danh Vo. 50

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In her essay, ‘History Depletes Itself’, Claire Bishop critiques Vo’s work, writing that his success makes her ‘uneasy’, as the biographical is privileged so that the ‘poetics of the past [are] prone to devolving into information as ornament’.59 In Vo’s work, he overwrites another’s history with his own, exemplified by his inclusion in his work of the letter by Saint JeanThéophane Vénard. Could it be perceived that Vo has masked the voice of Vénard with his own? Ethically, to what degree should practitioners — be they artists, designers, or illustrators — appropriate the voice of another? If illustrators reduce the past to ‘ornament’ without consideration of what our appropriation of it might communicate, then it is problematic. Perhaps illustrators should not pretend to mimic the past in their aesthetic, but instead root it in the present to create a figurative ‘interruption’ 60 of our current position that allows for reflection. When representing historical people, illustrators can position themselves in varying degrees alongside the narratives, for example, as an observer or as a subject. They can narrate while maintaining a critical distance from their subject, or otherwise embed themselves within the story. The illustrator can never fully remove themselves from their retelling, and their work allows for a ‘squint-eyed view’ 61 of the past – as if they are a prism, which light shines through (see page 27).

Constructing Voice There are different methods that illustrators can use to construct historical voices in their work. Does the illustrator position themselves or their families within the story? Do they rely on their own memories or recollections? Do they adapt the stories of other people? Do they approach the narrative from a critical distance? Are the voices and biographies in the historical tale real or imagined? The choice of the word construction is intentional, as it links back to Rodney Harrison’s description of heritage-making as one that ‘assembles’ new futures with fragments of the past (see pages 20-21). Over the next few pages, I will divide the positions that illustrators take — as subject, as director, and as inventor — I do not argue however that illustrators only fit within one of these three roles, and I anticipate that there will be overlaps, but by exploring these three positions, we can start to tease apart the different approaches toward heritage-making as illustrators.

Illustration Practitioner as Subject

Illustrators can approach history through the personal, focusing on their own family biography or experiences. They can embed themselves within the narrative, as a character or a narrator. The illustrator’s family relationships may allow for a connection to a historical story, which could imply Illustration and Historical Voices

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that they are a more reliable and authentic narrator. Taking the example of the Family in Wartime exhibition (see page 22), we must be aware that this can lead to a misinterpretation of history — but we should also consider that the illustrator might not be aiming for a truthful retelling of the past (see page 27). There are many examples of the use of an illustrator’s family history in graphic novels. This medium allows illustrators to use a sequential narrative to tell a story, through the interplay of text and images. Chen Jianghong’s Mao and Me (2008) tells the story of Chairman Mao and the proclamation of the Cultural Revolution, which is narrated from Jianghong’s perspective as a child. Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Heimat (2018) investigates her family’s experience under the Nazi regime, and charts her journey back to Germany. In her work Sunday’s Child (2019), Serena Katt tells the story of Nazi Germany through her grandfather’s experiences and memories. However, the work questions whether this ‘optimistic story’ 62 of her grandfather as a young boy in the Hitler Youth is entirely truthful. Throughout the story, Katt uses a second voice, her own, that fills in omitted details, questions his recollections, and interrogates his version of events.

Practitioner Interview: Serena Katt serena katt  

I had this idea of working with family history and family memory, and, quite specifically, working with memories attached to the Nazi past and my family’s experiences. I didn't really know what I was doing when I started, and I certainly feel like I’ve learned so much more about research since I finished Sunday’s Child. A lot of it was quite unconscious and not particularly planned. Initially I was learning-by-doing — I was in the process of trying to find a family story to work with, and I was gaining an understanding of what my grandad’s childhood was like. It was a couple of months into my second year at the Royal College of Art when my granddad died. That was the catalyst for me looking more deeply into his photographs and the things that he’d left behind, and that, alongside searching for a story, just happened at the same time.

rachel emily taylor  

Did you work with your grandfather’s diaries

and letters? serena katt  

When he was alive, about five years at least before his death, I sat down with him and said, ‘You have amazing family photos, I really would like to know more about them, and more about the family’s history.’ He spent ages withholding the stories behind the images. When I pushed him again, he wrote me

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this … he called it a CV, which is Lebenslauf in German. I think the word can be used interchangeably as ‘CV’ or ‘life story’. I don’t know what the exact equivalent is in English, but it was this briefly worded document: ‘1928, born’ and, ‘This is what my family were doing here.’ So, I had about five sheets of A4 paper in total that looked back at his whole life, and then snippets of information about his family. It provided a chronological framework to work with, but also it provided me with his language.

Figure 2.9. Serena Katt, Research Drawing for Sunday’s Child, published by Jonathan Cape, 2019. .

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Figure 2.10. Serena Katt, Research Drawing for Sunday’s Child, published by Jonathan Cape, 2019.

Figure 2.11. Serena Katt, Research Drawing for Sunday’s Child, published by Jonathan Cape, 2019.

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rachel emily taylor  

Because that would have been written in

German? serena katt  

Yes, in German, and then, of course, in his own way of expressing certain things and his funny ways of describing family memories or, you know, words that I might not have used. Putting the book together was a challenge for me. I'm bilingual — I can understand his German. But, finding the right language to put it into in English was difficult. I don't think I got it all the time.

rachel emily taylor  

It is not just a layering of voices, but there is language and translation to consider.

serena katt  

Yes, and that started to become even more apparent when I interviewed his sister. She was still alive when I was doing the project, and the language, and the colloquialisms, and her way of phrasing things, I just … I loved listening to her and listening back. There're lots of things that I just couldn’t translate into English, but I just had to sort of sense it.

Sunday’s Child is not just a retelling of your grandfather’s Lebenslauf. The layered voices — both your own (in the present) and your grandfather’s (in the past) — are brought together to tell another story. Perhaps, between these two voices, we get that sense of what might be a ‘truth’?

rachel emily taylor  

serena katt  

Absolutely. He was someone who overexaggerated his achievements and told everyone how amazing he was all the time. I really wanted to understand what things might have happened to him and what he wasn’t talking about.

rachel emily taylor  

In his diaries, it sounds like there are omissions and moments of silence. Things that are edited out. Did you aim to draw attention to these moments? Yes. I think it took me a while to understand that Sunday’s Child needed a second voice, and then it took me a bit longer to understand that maybe it should be my voice. When I started playing with it, it just worked. I used my voice to point out, ‘Maybe this didn’t happen’, ‘Actually, your sister told me a different version’, or, ‘What I know from my research is that what you’re saying here didn’t happen like that.’ My voice acted as a signpost for the questions a reader might have.

serena katt  

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rachel emily taylor  

Do you think your grandfather’s story helps the reader to understand a larger narrative? In your work, does his experience become a representation of other people at that time?

serena katt  

I’m really interested in looking at how differently we can (or how I can, as a maker) position myself in relation to these stories. Sometimes we’re at a great distance, and that is quite different to being zoomed in. I’m really interested in thinking about those differences, the varying distances and positions that we can occupy, and how that shapes our view of history. Also, as an illustrator, how we turn that thought into an image or sequence. In Sunday’s Child, the majority of images came from archives rather than family photos — my grandfather is depicted, but the backgrounds are based on archival images.

Figure 2.12. Serena Katt, Sunday’s Child, published by Jonathan Cape, 2019.

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Figure 2.13. Serena Katt, Sunday’s Child, published by Jonathan Cape, 2019.

rachel emily taylor 

Your practice is piecing together these separate parts. Through drawing, collaging, and making, it becomes one image, as if it’s an act of repair.

serena katt  

I spend a long time playing with the composition and there’s a lot of drafting; zooming in, zooming out. I do think about negative space, but how I use it is often based on what’s already there in the image.

Sunday’s Child is an example of how an illustrator might approach telling a historical story: a family member acts as an anchor to a historical time and allows the illustrator to position themselves in the narrative. What is particularly intriguing about Katt’s process is her acknowledgement that she was ‘learning-by-doing’, evidencing a tacit knowledge in the making of Sunday’s Child. In On Not Knowing : How Artists Think, Rebecca Fortnum writes about the artists ‘intuitive’ 63 making process, quoting Paula Rego discussing her practice, ‘you are doing it to find out what the result will be’,64 and this could be compared to Katt.65 Instinctively, when drafting Sunday’s Child, Katt zoomed in and out of the images, both visually through making, but also metaphorically, and that act could be perceived as representing the shift in her relationship to her grandfather’s story. The use of magnification in the reinterpretation of archival images can be compared to the spotlight effect of empathy. But Illustration and Historical Voices

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the act of cropping, repositioning, and zooming also illustrates Katt’s own emotional journey in processing the diary. Readers have noted that the work allowed them to reflect — and to question ‘What would you have done?’66 if they had been in the same situation. Danh Vo uses his relationship with his father to access the past. But, unlike Vo (who applied this relationship and its meaning to the letter of Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard), Katt does not stray too far from her grandfather’s experiences, nor apply them to another historical figure. Her working process can be compared to that of a historian, but also sits within the frame of Rodney Harrison’s ‘regime of care’ 67 of heritage-making : categorising (recovering), curating (collecting, selecting), and communicating (using, interpreting) (see page 21).

Illustration Practitioner as Director

Illustrators can distance themselves from their version of history. Rather than drawing on their own family history, experiences, and memories, as a subject or actor within their portrayal, they can be metaphorically positioned behind the stage as a director. For example, using characters, actors, or participants in the portrayal of a historical story, rather than their own family members. Artist Corin Sworn approaches history with a degree of separation. Her installation Silent Sticks (2015) was inspired by the stock characters from the Commedia dell’Arte and notions of mistaken identity (see Figures 2.14 and 2.15). During a discussion with Sworn in Glasgow in 2017, she described to me the intention behind the work: ‘I don’t believe you can get back to 1550. I’m interested in the game of pretending 1550.’ 68 Sworn does not aim to recreate the past, but she does explore the way that she — and the viewer — read and interpret the past.69 By responding to a historical narrative, she reinterprets it to reveal notions of the present day, which she achieves with the integration of the past and the present through her choice of objects. As part of her research into Commedia dell’Arte, Sworn worked with a sixteenth-century prop list, legacies, and drawings. Frustrated by the lack of information she could find about the Commedia dell’Arte, she began to research a real-life case of mistaken identity, the story of sixteenth-century French peasant Martin Guerre.70 Rather than focusing on the archetypal characters of the theatre, as was her initial intention, she retells the story of an individual who did exist. The work demonstrates how a historical person can be used in a contemporary artwork. In this case, Sworn positioned herself as the director 71 of Guerre’s narrative, rather than as a character in his story. To retell Guerre’s narrative, Sworn combines film projection, sound, mirrors, costume, and objects in her display. Reviews describe the film as the key to linking these disparate elements.72 However, the significance of 58

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Figure 2.14. Corin Sworn, Silent Sticks, 2015. [The Whitechapel Gallery, UK].

Figure 2.15. Corin Sworn, Silent Sticks, 2015. [The Whitechapel Gallery, UK].

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the spoken voice cannot be ignored as without the sound, the installation would lack Sworn’s narrative. The story is recounted by a narrator, whose voice emits from speakers placed around the installation. The voice is not Sworn’s, but that of an actor. The audio has been described as ‘ghosts’,73 but, from my position, I felt that it was as if the objects were speaking. The curator, Daniel Herrmann, at the Whitechapel Gallery, explains that the installation presents ‘the objects as actor’.74 This implies that the narrative voice emanates from the props, which then appear to speak as an ensemble. The objects become the archetypal characters in the story and appear to be the physical form from which the narrator’s voice originates. Sworn regards the objects as ‘dead figures, where the being had died but the figure has remained; an abstract’. 75 Unlike Katt recounting her grandfather’s recollections, Sworn doesn’t aim to retell a truly accurate story of Guerre’s life. Silent Sticks slips ‘between fact, fiction and fantasy’.76 Sworn says that, in the work, she aims to use ‘guise and costume to address social anxieties around status and recognition’, 77 and, in turn, question authority. The figure of Martin Guerre represents a larger narrative or message, rather than simply telling his story. This is an example of how a historical figure can be used as a vehicle of history and a tool to allow for an exploration of contemporary anxieties. The installation Kept Within the Bounds could be perceived as having similar functions to Silent Sticks, and my role could also be understood as that of director. As discussed earlier in the chapter, I ran workshops with children to explore their relationships with the foundling children in the hopes of constructing the ‘lost’ voice of the historical child that had not yet been given a ‘place’ in the museum.78 The aim behind working with children was that I had hoped that it would lead to a sense of ‘hot’ authenticity (see page 23), as I felt unable to construct the missing voice myself as an adult.79 We can compare this with Sworn – she also did not act alone and drew from others in the assemblage of her work.80 At the Foundling Museum, I facilitated the workshop sessions and created an installation where disparate parts were brought together into a unified whole, and integrated the children’s paintings, as if they were artefacts, into Kept Within the Bounds. The installation also included other items from the workshops and an audio recording of my voice as I read through the workshop instructions, which allowed for the integration of text and image — while looking, a viewer can hear the text — and also explained the making process for the work. The display structure for Kept Within the Bounds was made from MDF, with the intention that it would not be mistaken for a historical object, but the shape was reminiscent of the floorplan of the Foundling Hospital building that once stood on Coram’s Fields and no longer exists. The installation recreates a space to acknowledge what is missing, where the foundlings once lived. The paintings of the boys represent the boy’s wing, the paintings of the girls represent the girl’s wing, with an entrance gate and chapel. The paintings were affixed to the walls of the building; the 60

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children were effectively placed on the edge of the structure, enclosed,81 as if they were looking out through windows that framed them and contained their bodies. The window, which implied the foundlings could be observed, was intended as a reference to a panopticon, 82 following Michel Foucault’s description of this device as an ideal form of modern disciplinary institution, employing an unequal ‘gaze’ in which ‘one is totally seen, without ever seeing’. 83 During the project, I began to view the contemporary children in the workshops as understudies, their participation highlighted the absence of the historical children. It was as if I was a director ‘blocking’84 a scene. A director works with a team of actors and staff (stagehands, lighting designers, set designers, and so on) to realise a performance. In comparison, I worked with a team of museum curators, collection managers, children, and museum visitors. Kept Within the Bounds is comparable to theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht’s Gestus, which is an acting technique that combines physical gestures and attitude, as the work showed the medium of the workshops through the inclusion of the workshop instructions, and constructed a momentary tableau (a collection of motionless figures, or paintings, representing a scene from history). The installation was a kind of Brechtian ‘interruption’ creating a ‘state of unsettlement’85 in the museum. Characterisation and the presentation of historical people is a blurred territory in the project. The children were asked to blend fact and fiction to imagine the spaces in-between: the foundlings, the ‘little blanks’,86 the gaps in history. The children’s imagined characters were used to highlight the blanks and these fictional representations are viewed in relation to the foundlings’ lives. When I planned the workshop sessions, I wanted to explore how children imagine the past, but, more particularly, how a child imagines another historical child and what this could bring to the representation. My intention was not only to engage the children with the narrative of the foundlings, but also to help myself understand — as an adult — how a child might respond. Kept Within the Bounds is a form of heritage, as it draws on the past while allowing us to consider the present and future. For example, as the work was undertaken as part of academic research, the contemporary children were not allowed to be photographed, named, or given recognition for their participation, due to the limitations put in place by Sheffield Hallam University’s ethics committee. Both the historical and the contemporary child disappeared in the project, and this allowed for a questioning of contemporary rules of protection and care. Both Silent Sticks and Kept Within the Bounds are examples of how history can be approached through the position of a director, and although the work is not authorless, there is an attempt to stand off-stage and collaborate with others in the creation of a work.

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Illustration Practitioner as Inventor

The lives and voices that the illustrator includes in their work are not always factual or truthful. This is an issue also encountered in other disciplines. Artist Lubaina Himid explores ‘lost and forgotten lives’ in the work Men in Drawers (2017–18) and seeks to evoke ‘memories of people whose names no one had bothered to write down’.87 The portraits she paints within the drawers88 allow for an encounter with lives that have gone before, the other people who used the drawers before you. The men depicted, however, have never actually existed, they are from the artist’s own imagination, but they are representative of a larger group of people: those who are gone and have been forgotten. Another example is anthropologist Sienna Craig, who, in her book, The Ends of Kinship, employs narrative ethnography and short fiction to engage with histories of migration and tradition, focusing on the people from Mustang (Nepal). Craig tells the story of people from this region by inventing fictional characters, which she established after decades of research. These imagined lives become representative of a larger story, forming a blank canvas for the author to work with, rather than lifting up the lives of those who have existed. Illustrator Laura Copsey collaborated with Philip Crewe for the Engine House Residency (2021) at the new site of the Quentin Blake Centre of Illustration. The site — a 300-year-old former waterworks at the New River Head in London — will be discussed in depth in Chapter 4, ‘Illustration and

Figure 2.15. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, New River Wading [making cameraless photographs with the New River water], 2021. 62

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Historical Landscape’ (see pages 157-167). The residency brief states that the institution’s aims were to ‘collaborate with different people to learn and share the site’s stories’.89 As part of their response to the brief, they invented historical characters to help them in their retelling of history.

Practitioner Interview: Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe philip crewe  

We are both interested in those esoteric museums that you find in small towns and out-of-the-way places. We’re captivated by the kind of stories that those collections hold, and how stories are told there. This shared interest was our starting point for the Engine House Residency with the House of Illustration [now known as Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration] in 2021.

laura copsey  

We were confident it would be a museum from the start. Fragments, objects, and images that speculate on the lives of everyday Londoners from the era of the New River’s construction. Philip is skilled at traditional craft, so we knew that it would end up looking quite a lot like history, with a fictional layer – we wanted things to look believable so, the making was important, and it weaves a complex story.

rachel emily taylor  

I want to pick up on that comment, that you anticipated it would ‘look like history’. By this, are you talking about the interplay between object and caption in a museum? Or just the very nature of it appearing to be presented as historical fact? What do we anticipate history to look like?

laura copsey  

History is always a story that can be interpreted. We are interested in the gaps in a history, and how we might speculate to fill those gaps. It can tell us something about ourselves now and there’s always a political dimension. The things we were curious about when doing our research, and the stories that we’ve focused on, say a lot about us in the present.

philip crewe  

When you’re a kid and you see a historical re-enactment — people dressed as Vikings — that’s ‘living history’. I find it interesting when they try and make it as authentic as they can. They’re always going to fail, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to try and make it as truthful as they can in that moment. Through their attempt at authenticity, they construct an experience that participants and spectators find compelling, or at least entertaining.

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rachel emily taylor  

This idea of gaps in history that you mention, it is as if you're using your practice to fill these gaps: illustration is pulling the separate parts together. Your project at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration employed characters. Did you invent them?

philip crewe  

We found, and based, our collection on three characters: one character almost certainly existed; one we have a name for, so maybe they existed in some capacity; and one maybe existed, maybe didn’t. They were from marginalised historic groups, so we’ll never be able to know them. But, to be honest, the same could be said about even well-documented historical characters whose diaries we can still read, for example. There are many motivations for writing a diary. History is constantly being rewritten as it’s so much about what we see in it today. We found the three characters inspiring, and the ‘gaps’ sparked conversations between us that we then filled with work that flowed from that inspiration [the characters they created].

laura copsey  

Our characters have three different heritage occupations that relate to the New River [the water source that ends at the New River Head], jobs that working class people would have had at the time. These three characters became ‘frameworks’ to allow us to think about their lives and to speculate. Our characters are named Mary Woolaston, Joan Starkey, and William Smythe [who later changed his name to William Mollitrape], and there is an anxiety to using real people’s given names. We feel a responsibility to treat our characters with care. It is not like we are saying, ‘this was definitely Joan Starkey and her life’, so we will make the fictional aspects apparent in the museum curation. We hope the audience will see it as an imaginative approach to heritage, and how these gaps can spark ideas or lead to creative opportunities.

rachel emily taylor  

So, you have these objects, or fragments of a life, and these empty spaces that a visitor — or reader — can fill with their imagination when they interact with the work?

philip crewe  

But that’s the power of things, isn’t it? Objects are real, and that realness is true. Then, people can take that reality and apply their perspectives to it. Stories get lost with objects as well, don’t they? As with history, objects become recontextualised — as many things in archives or museum collections do — when the original story may be lost, and then someone finds [the gap] and fills it with a new story.

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Figure 2.16. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, William Mollitrape’s Saw, 2022. Photographed by Paul Grover. laura copsey  

We’re interested in how an object’s story is always in flux, but objects are also tangible things that you can touch, hold, or interact with on a personal level. This is fictional, but these people existed. But then, history is always a story.

Copsey and Crewe exhibited the outcome of their residency, titled New River Folk, at Quentin Blake Centre of Illustration in September 2022. I visited the site — at the time, it was still a work-in-progress as it was being redeveloped ­— and approached the finished work. I recall it was raining heavily, and I moved quickly towards the so-called ‘round house’, which is the remains of a windmill that was used to pump water. Before you entered this space, you were met with a caption, written collaboratively between Copsey, Crewe, and the Artistic Director Olivia Ahmad, that read: When you go inside this building, you will be entering a museum. It is different from most museums. You will find information about people who lived in Clerkenwell hundreds of years ago. But the objects you’ll see were all made in the summer last year. In 2021 Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe researched the history of water in this area. They focused on the trades and superstitions that were part of people’s lives in the seventeenth century.

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Figure 2.17. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, New River Folk Museum, Mary Woolastone’s Collection, 2022. Photographed by Paul Grover.

Figure 2.18. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, New River Folk Museum, William Mollitrape’s Collection, 2022. Photographed by Paul Grover.

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Figure 2.19. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, Joan Starkey’s Water Tankard, 2022. Photographed by Paul Grover.

Copsey and Crewe found the names of three working-class Londoners: Mary Woolaston, Joan Starkey, and William Mollitrape. They [Copsey and Crewe] crafted objects to tell each of their stories using different techniques and materials found at the site.

New River Folk speculates on the experiences and beliefs of people who do not appear in ‘official’ museums or written histories. By combining archival fragments and fiction, Copsey and Crewe have made them visible.90 Inside the building, the illustrative objects made by Copsey and Crewe were laid on a curved table that was built for the space, they were also numbered, with a print-out that included further information and captions. Amongst the objects on display, there was a replica mummers mask 91 (see Figure 2.17), a ceramic tankard made with London clay (see Figure 2.19), and a bottle of New River water turned into ale. The curatorial strategy was comparable to that of a traditional museum display, although there was no glass vitrine preventing the objects from being touched – even so, I did not witness any visitor handling the items. If we recall how A Family at Wartime focused on one family to tell a larger story, Copsey and Crewe used a similar method by focusing on three characters, and although they were imagined, they were given real names from historical records. It could be perceived that the real names add ‘hot’ authenticity to the work, and this is needed so that the narrative is not too far adrift from the history that they seek to retell. By using the names and the real occupations that were attributed to them in archival documents (mole-catcher, well-keeper, tankard-bearer), the story Copsey and Crewe weave is not completely fictional, but the details of the lives and the physical descriptions are invented. This narrative gives more of a Illustration and Historical Voices

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sense of what life might have been like for working-class Londoners on or by the New River in the seventeenth century. Fiction is used to pull together the threads of fact that Copsey and Crewe found, and to flesh out the work. The caption states that Copsey and Crewe have made these people ‘visible’. I want to question this idea of visibility, and, whether or not illustration practice should aim for this. I would argue that the work has not made any representations of people visible. Instead, Copsey and Crewe have made fictional objects that are attributed to imagined lives, and then written captions, which suggest a form of character. Comparable to the way Sworn used objects and props in her installation Silent Sticks, Copsey and Crewe’s objects become actors and visual representations of characters, which have been attributed a voice (through audio and captions). It is through these objects, almost like a conduit, that these characters could be perceived as being made visible. But they are not fully present. What are the moral and ethical questions for illustrators when they focus on a real person in their work, such as Vénard and Guerre? If imagined historical characters have been attributed names, like Joan Starkey, do illustrators have a moral responsibility to the real people behind the name? Do imagined historical characters give the illustrator the right to bypass restrictions that might be placed on telling a historical ‘truth’? These questions are dependent on multiple factors, such as the history, the person, and the motivation of the illustrator and/or institution. New River Folk provides an alternative to Authorised Heritage Discourse, as Copsey and Crewe play with familiar museological formats and subvert them. They challenge the function of museums and curatorial practice as a form of storytelling, placing ‘people who do not appear in “official” museums’92 at the centre of their narrative. The project evidences heritage-making, through categorising (documenting, nominating, listing, recovering), curating (selecting, attributing value), conserving (archiving, managing), and communicating (using, interpreting, exhibiting) (see page 21). When viewing New River Folk, I drew comparisons with Andrea Fraser’s artwork Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 93 because of the work’s portrayal of ‘character’. Museum Highlights is a destabilisation of the traditional museum tour, and it allows for the same critique of the heritage industry sought by the Association of Critical Heritage Studies manifesto (see page 21) by exposing an alternative viewpoint to that of the institution. Fraser performs the fictional persona of Jane Castleton, a docent94 in the museum. Castleton represents the non-expert, a middle-class employee, although Fraser points out that Castleton is not a character or an individual, ‘She is an object’.95 This identification of person-as-object is a theme that Fraser explores throughout her practice. ‘I’m not a person today. I’m an object within an artwork’, 96 she writes. This statement opens discussions of performer as art object; Fraser gives ‘her body in the absence of art objects’.97 In Museum Highlights she is described as both ‘Fraser-Jane and FraserMuseum and Jane-Museum’ in the performance.98 (See Figure 2.17).

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Figure 2.17. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. Performance, “Contemporary Viewpoints” artists lecture series, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Courtesy of Andrea Fraser and Mariam Goodman Gallery.

Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, Shannon Jackson analyses Museum Highlights by describing the stylised performance as a form of acting that ‘“shows” rather than “becomes” its character’ 99 — a technique known as Gestus (see page 61), which I discussed earlier in this chapter — and, in the museum, ‘de-familiarisation’ 100 occurs in an attempt to allow ‘the hidden truth to reveal itself’.101 Fraser achieves this by stripping herself of identity to present institutional critique through her physical actions. Fraser’s Jane Castleton is a ‘stylised portrayal’102 of an individual, and is the vehicle for the artist’s critical voice. Jackson describes Fraser as a ‘narrator for the character’103 of Castleton, rather than embodying the character; although Fraser does not necessarily agree with this statement. She writes, ‘The alienation is a consequence of the identifications with objects and institutions more than the outcome of a method of performance.’ 104 The effect of alienation is produced by the script, which is synthesised from an array of sources 105 on institutions.106 Although Jane Castleton appears knowledgeable, she refuses to convey to the public the knowledge that they ‘desire’ 107 as she continues her monologue performance and answers no questions. Fraser treats her surroundings and audience with the same ‘detachment as the historian adopts with those of the past’ 108 — what Brecht describes as ‘historicization’ 109 — and this creates a critical distance between her and the onlookers.

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Copsey and Crewe’s illustrative objects, exhibited as part of the New River Folk installation, could be viewed as Gestus, in that they show, rather than become, a character. The characters are objects, comparable to Sworn’s props in Silent Sticks, which were perceived as ‘actors’. It is also worth noting that Copsey and Crewe do not remove themselves from the work, but instead become characters within its creation. For example, the duo playfully take on the role of archaeologists in a fictitious company called ‘Copsey and Crew TM Narrative Excavation Services for Hire’ that ‘dig for stories of marginalised workers from history’. 110 They do not pretend to be truthful in their act, but become alter-egos, and are present in the exhibition, running a gift shop. The roles of museum guide and archaeologist could be thought of as Authorised Heritage Discourse, but Jackson, Copsey, and Crewe subvert the power of these roles through performance.

Figure 2.18. A Mythic Understanding: Inspired by David Jones [installation shot], Camberwell Space, 2018.

A Choral Voice Copsey and Crewe worked collaboratively to materialise Mary Woolaston, Joan Starkey, and William Mollitrape. Illustrators can work together to create multiple responses to historical lives, which could take the form of a group exhibition or publication, for example. This approach is another method that illustrators can adopt to represent a historical person.

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Geoff Coupland led the project A Mythic Understanding (2018), which explored the life of the illustrator and poet David Jones.111 The project offered a multi-faceted view of Jones, which featured an exhibition of work by illustrators including, John Vernon Lord, Clive Hicks Jenkins, Charlotte Cory, Marguerite Carnec, and others. Coupland proposes that illustration allowed for a presentation of a ‘much neglected voice’ from a new perspective. The work culminated in a group exhibition. (See Figure 2.18).

Practitioner Interview: Geoff Coupland geoff coupland  

The first time David Jones came up for me at Camberwell [College of Arts, where Coupland teaches illustration], is when I saw the frontispiece for In Parenthesis. It was an amazing image. For anyone who believes illustration is just kind of fluffy and decorative, here was an artist that really experienced deep trauma, and then used illustration and communication to help himself and help others. He communicated his feelings through his art but was able to reference a million other things at the same time. I put a photocopy of the frontispiece on the office door to be an instructive emblem that students saw every day, and I remember saying to my boss Darryl [Clifton] that ‘we should do a project about this’. Then, years later, it was coming up to the centenary of the Great War, and I saw that Camberwell College of Arts wasn’t really planning to do much about it, despite the Great War having almost unquantifiable importance historically, and despite Camberwell having a significant place in the life of this person who made so much significant art about that conflict: David Jones. We facilitated a workshop with the students that was looking at David Jones and saying, ‘OK, so he went through traumatic life experiences and transmuted that into his art through coded mythic statements and allusions. It’s like a mythic processing’. I think I made up that term when I was writing for the project, which went on to be called A Mythic Understanding.

rachel emily taylor 

Although this project began with David Jones, the illustrators who took part did not necessarily link their work to him and his life, that is correct?

geoff coupland  

Oh yes, definitely. If we asked for student responses that were directly linked to the First World War, we might just get lots of really, really bad pictures of people in steel helmets. We needed to actively facilitate the students in the making of work that would aid their own development, using their Illustration and Historical Voices

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own versions of conceptual tools that Jones used. I have a record of David Jones speaking, which is amazing. He had a voice like a crow. We played that recording at the start of the workshops. The process was experiential and immersive. I was first interested in A Mythic Understanding, as it weaves together multiple responses to David Jones, which are then included in the exhibition. There is a richness to that, which you could almost describe as a ‘choral’ response.

rachel emily taylor 

geoff coupland  

Yes, it’s kind of choral, but also, it’s only one point of view per person, as the students were reflecting on very personal aspects of their own lives. Then again, as we were all in one large studio working together on large chunks of paper during the workshop days — and they were all working from the same brief with the same range of materials in the same room — when you see it all together, it is made of multiple personal responses with a sort of harmony. We were all working with the idea that ‘myth’, or ‘mythic understanding’, might be a kind of self-care. Myth can help us in our lives. It can help us understand the psyche. In each mythic processing, there are layers of truth interleaved with lessons, reflections on ideas and tropes, examples of archetypes, comparisons of your own life to the lives (real or fictional) of people, gods, heroes, villains, animals, and even animistic relationships to elements of nature, like plants, geological processes, and weather.

Figure 2.19. A Mythic Understanding: Inspired by David Jones [typeface, design by work-form], 2018. 72

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Figure 2.20. A Mythic Understanding: Inspired by David Jones [installation shot], Camberwell Space, 2018.

When trying to capture a historical person and represent them through a form of illustration, a group exhibition is a powerful tool in portraying a sense of a person. In A Mythic Understanding, the illustrators integrated aspects of their own lives into their work. The blending of self (the illustrator) with the other (David Jones) created a contemporary representation. Returning to Steven Connor’s thoughts on chorality, this work could be thought of within that frame as the practitioner’s works are grouped together as a cohesive response, although each work has a different tone — a harmonic voice. Working with others can be a method for engaging with heritage. Another illustrator who uses this method is Yeni Kim, who has been using illustration practice to capture the disappearing culture of Jeju Island in South Korea. Although Kim was not aiming to represent a specific historical figure, she captured the voice of the community, and uses that voice to represent the female diving culture known as ‘haenyeo’. 112 As a final outcome, she created a picture book, titled 바당밧 (Badangbat, 2020). During the research process, she facilitated workshops with elementary school children from Jeju Island to help her visualise their culture. This project is an example of how multiple voices and experiences can form the basis of a singular illustrative work (see Figures 2.24 and 2.25).

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Practitioner Interview: Yeni Kim yeni kim  

How can illustration capture immaterial things? In 바당밧 (Badangbat), I was questioning how illustration can capture intangible heritage in the community. In the Jeju community, there are two disappearing intangible heritages: 제주어 (Jejueo), which means Jeju language, and 해녀 (Haenyeo), the female free divers. I wanted to examine how illustration can capture the essence of these two things and explore how it can open a conversation between generations.

rachel emily taylor 

Heritage isn’t just a physical object, and, as you say, it can be intangible, an essence. In your project, the language, the diving culture, these things that you can’t quite grasp and hold on to … your use of illustration to capture them is fascinating.

yeni kim  

I've been asking myself, what can illustration do? Illustration can be seen as a visual medium. It can be a language. At the beginning of the project, I thought I could use illustration to visualise the culture. That was my initial idea, which was really simple. For the project, my main outcome was a picture book. But to make a picture book, I needed to collect the material through interviews, and then construct a story, and then translate the story into illustrations. So, in the beginning, I was simply aiming to visualise something people might not be able to see — because this heritage can be intangible — I wanted to make it tangible. I worked with an ethnographer, I went to a library, then to the museum. I wasn’t just illustrating what I had been told, but it was my visual interpretation of what they had told. I was using illustration as a tool to understand the subject. I also used illustration in workshops to educate and raise interest in disappearing culture, and drawing became a way of ‘knowing’. The biggest problem I had during the project was the disconnection between generations. The young people do not know much about the language or the diving culture. Illustration and drawing became a bridge. Children could understand their ancestral language through the workshops while making and drawing. In this case, illustration became a way of knowing and educating.

rachel emily taylor 

Can you expand on the process of using illustration as a research tool?

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Figure 2.21. Yeni Kim, Kisuk Oh and Kyungyeon Kim [an interview with Haenyeo in Hadori Fishing Village], 2020. Photographed by Kyungah Jeanette Lee.

Figure 2.22. Yeni Kim, Ethnographer and culture critic Yujeong Kim draws to detail his stories [alongside some collective drawings made during the interviews], 2020.

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yeni kim  

I met with an ethnographer because I am not an expert on the subject of Jeju culture; I’m an illustrator. I interviewed Yujeong Kim, the ethnographer, and two Haenyeo, Kyungyeon Kim and Kisuk Oh. During the sessions, we used illustration because words couldn’t capture everything. For example, when I listened in the interview, I checked what I understood was correct through drawing. The illustrations helped to shape the conversations. I drew a line, and then I asked them, ‘Is this what you said?’ And then the interviewees drew, deleted, or added lines to my illustration to explain and shape their memories, which couldn’t be fully explained in words. In the workshops with elementary school students, while they were making (cutting and pasting, drawing, touching materials with their hands), it helped them to think more about the subject and what they’re shaping. We used illustration as a conversational tool.

rachel emily taylor 

Did illustration aid the communication between yourself and the children in the workshops?

yeni kim  

I think illustration can be an education tool. It can be used to capture knowledge and make a record. History is not just over there; it is how people interpret the past and how they understand it, and Illustration can help.

Figure 2.23. Yeni Kim, Students from Hamdeok Elementary School making Tewak using recycled materials, 2020. Photographed by Kyungah Jeanette Lee.

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Figure 2.24. Yeni Kim, Badangbat, 2020. [Jeju Haenyeo shares the knowledge and exchanges the information in Bulteok before and after harvest in the sea].

Figure 2.25. Yeni Kim, Badangbat, 2020. [A mother and daughter Haenyeo hold their hands to show the strong bond and unity of motherhood in Haenyeo culture].

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Kim’s engagement with workshops and the community evidences how an illustrator can draw from multiple experiences and ‘voices’ when making their work. This research is synthesised into a final outcome. There is a comparison to be made between this project and the workshops that I led at the Foundling Museum, which I facilitated in the hope that they would bring me closer to the material I was interpreting. In both projects, when the children could not express themselves verbally, illustration became a tool to help communicate and interpret their relationship to their culture and/or the past. We have already seen that Mireille Fauchon and Rachel Gannon consider that illustration has potential when ‘applied as methodology’ 113 (see pages 24-25). These projects further highlight the potential that illustration has when used as a method across other disciplines, particularly when it seeks to understand how people interact with one another and society.

Figure 2.26. Yeni Kim, Tamnarok: A record of Tamna [exhibition], 2020. [A mother and daughter read the picture book Badangbat together in the exhibition].

In the edited interviews that are included in this chapter, the practitioners have focused on marginalised and / or absent figures in historical records. Illustration can fuse together historical documentation from the past to communicate a version of history, particularly when the truth is dislocated, broken, or lost. The illustrator must be aware of the power that they hold 78

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in communicating the historical voice, and when they speak for another, they must remind themselves of the ethical responsibility to the story that they tell. When discussing the positions an illustrator can take when representing a historical person, I explored how this might be framed as subject, director, and inventor, and, although I do not believe that the positions are so rigid – there will be overlap, this allowed for an exploration of different forms of practice. Throughout this chapter, questions of truth and our responsibility to the past have been raised. We cannot ask for the dead’s permission, but how honest and truthful should we be when representing them in our work? This is not easily answered, as it would be dependent on the project and the illustrator, but we should ask ourselves motives, positionality, audience, and impact. We cannot speak to the dead for their guidance, but we have a responsibility to the future and how our representations can shape heritage and understandings of identity.

Figure 2.27. Yeni Kim, Tamnarok: A record of Tamna [exhibition], 2020

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1. Caption at the British Library, Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound exhibition (2017–18). 2. A ‘phonautogram’ is the visual study of acoustic sound, tracing vibrations using a pig bristle stylus onto lampblack-coated paper. 3. François Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016), p.8. 4. Plato, Timaeus, [67a], trans. Benjamin Jowett, cited by Bonnet, The Order of Sounds, p.9. 5. Phonation is the process where vocal folds produce sounds. 6. Brandon LaBelle, The Lexicon of the Mouth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p.1. 7. Hearing voices is sometimes called an auditory hallucination, and it has been linked to mental health problems, such as psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe depression. 8. The superego is part of Sigmund Freud’s personality theory (1928). It is related to ideas of voice, it being the voice of authority in the consciousness. 9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p.10 [Specters de Marx, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993.] 10. I am stressing the prefix ‘re-’ to link the ideas of representation and the return of the ghost. 11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Paul Prescott (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), i., 5., 210, [1599–1601]. 12. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.11. 13. Hauntology is a blend of two words ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’, the philosophical study of being. 14. Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) are sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted to be voices of spirits, and it was popularised by Parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive in the 1970s. 15. I recommend the reader watches Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance (1983), in the film Jacques Derrida speaks about ghosts and cinema. 16. Examples being the ‘child’s voice’, which is a phrase used in UK Child Protection Guidelines, or the ‘Black voice’, which includes a range of ethnicities and experiences under the one phrase. 17. Steven Connor, ‘Choralities’, Voices and Noises (NC, Duke University: 27 March 2015) [accessed 10 April 2017] 18. Connor, Choralities. 19. Steven Connor, This is a Voice (London: Wellcome Trust, 2016), p.10. 20. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.49. 21. Hannah Black cited Hannah Black’s Letter to the Whitney Biennial’s Curator’s: Dana Schutz Painting Must Go (2017) [accessed 18 May 2022]. 22. Randy Kennedy, ‘White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests’, New York Times, 21 March 2017 [accessed 18 May 2017]. 23. The Foundling Museum tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, which was established in 1739 by Thomas Coram to care for babies who could no longer be cared for by their families. The museum in London incorporates many original features from the eighteenth-century building, though it is not on the same site.

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24. A ‘foundling’ is a historic term for a child, usually a baby, who had been abandoned and placed into the care of someone other than family. 25. The work at the Foundling Museum was part of a practice-based PhD, titled Heritage as Process: Constructing the Historical Child’s Voice Through Art Practice, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Heritage Consortium and based at Sheffield Hallam University (2014–2018). 26. The handwriting books are kept in the London Metropolitan Archive, and the book I reference belonged to Abraham Taylor in 1840, where his fingerprints are clearly visible in the ink that marks the page. 27. The children were aged between 7 and 14 years, and this was the same age that the foundlings were when they lived in the Foundling Hospital, before being apprenticed. 28. Konstantin Stanislavski’s System is a systematic approach for an actor to use when constructing a character. During the workshops at the Foundling Museum, I employed his exercises ‘Magic If’ and ‘Given Circumstances’. The methods are outlined in his book An Actor’s Work, trans. Jean Benedetti (London: Routledge, 2008) [Работа Актёра Над Собой, Russia: Азбука-Классика, 1936.] 29. The exercises were based on the walk series in ‘Feeling What We Touch’ and the mirror sequence in ‘Seeing What We Look At’ described in Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1992). 30. Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’, October, 140, (2012), pp.91–112, p.110. 31. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton [nostalgia] (London: Afterall Books, 2006), p.10. 32. In one of the workshops, I recall a child saying to me that the foundlings ‘come from the other side’. It appeared that some of the children thought of the past in terms of ‘space’. These spatial and temporal dimensions are in Freud’s model of the unconscious, which he depicted as a ‘large entrance hall’ that is adjacent to a ‘kind of drawing-room – in which the consciousness too resides’. Refer to: Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture XIX: Resistance and Repression (1917)’, Standard Edition, Volume 16, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), p.337. 33. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work. 34. Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1997), p.30. 35. Philip Auslander, ‘Just Be Yourself: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’, in Acting Reconsidered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edition, ed. Phillip Zarrilli (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), p.54. 36. In October 2016, when Kept Within the Bounds was exhibited in the Foundling Museum’s Picture Gallery, the paintings of the White male hospital governors had never been replaced and no art intervention had attempted to disrupt them. It was a space dominated by images of White, upper-class men. It was not until the exhibition Ladies of Quality and Distinction (September 2018–January 2019) that the museum replaced these paintings with images of women who were also important in the history of the Foundling Hospital, women who had been governors, matrons, and inspectors. Today, the gallery displays a mixture of paintings, of both men and women, who were key figures in the Foundling Hospital’s history. 37. Foundling Hospital, Committee Minutes, 18 June 1761 (London Metropolitan Archives, London). 38. Foundling Hospital, Committee Minutes, 3 September 1761 (London Metropolitan Archives, London). 39. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Society. Illustration and Historical Voices

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40. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.94 41. Rachel Holmes and Liz Jones, ‘Limitless Provocations of the “safe”, “secure” and “healthy” child’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, (1), 2013, pp.75–99, p.90. 42. Holmes and Jones, Limitless Provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child. 43. Unnamed visitor to the Foundling Museum, conversation with Rachel Emily Taylor, October 2016. 44. Alan Kurdi and his family were crossing the Mediterranean sea when they drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos. Although the boy’s fate can’t be truly linked to that of the foundlings, I can only assume that the stories of mistreatment of children in the past allowed some viewers to consider the mistreatment of children in the present. 45. Helena Smith, ‘Shocking images of a drowned Syrian boy show tragic plight of refugees’, Guardian, 2 September 2015 [accessed 29 December 2022]. 46. I recommend the reader refers to Mark Fisher’s ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, 66, 1 (2012), pp.16–24. 47. The term ‘character’ was used during the panel discussion at the annual Heritage Consortium Conference at the Heritage Quay in May 2015. Lisa O’Neil was advising the Collection Manager at Hardwick Hall to use Lady Arbella Stuart as a ‘character’ to increase visitor numbers. 48. This could include another person, but also a fictional character in a story or an actor performing a role. 49. Melanie Klein, ‘Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy’ (1959), reprinted in ‘Envy and Gratitude’ and Other Works 1946–63, ed. Hannah Segal (London: Virago, 1988), pp.252–3. 50. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell, ‘The Elephant in the room: heritage, affect and emotion’ in William Logan et al., A Companion to Heritage Studies (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015) pp.443–461, p.449. 51. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2001); Beverly Southgate, ‘Memories into something new: Histories for the future’, Rethinking History, 11 (2), 2007, pp.187–99; Jorma Kalela, Making History: The Historian and Uses of the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 52. Smith and Campbell, The Elephant in the Room. 53. Bloom, Against Empathy, p.16. 54. Bloom, Against Empathy, p.9. 55. Jackie Leach Scully, ‘Other people’s lives: empathy, ethics, and epistemic justice’, unpublished keynote present at Empathies, University of Basel, June 2017. 56. Jesse Prinz, ‘On the Genealogy of Empathy’, unpublished keynote present at Empathies, University of Basel, June 2017. 57. Bloom, Against Empathy. 58. Marta Gnyp, Danh Vo [accessed 1 May 2018]. 59. Gnyp, Danh Vo. 60. ‘Interruption’ is a technique in Brechtian Epic Theatre where the actors collaborate to form a freeze frame.

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61. This refers to the discussion on ghosts earlier in the chapter, and how they are perceived as intangible, but it is also a reference to the words used by Michael Taussig to describe how a drawing can capture the spirit of the dead, offering an approximation in comparison to a photograph, see: Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p.11. 62. Serena Katt, Sunday’s Child (2019) [accessed 10 April 2022] 63. Rebecca Fortnum, ‘Creative Accounting: Not Knowing in Talking and Making’, in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, eds. Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013), p.76. 64. Fortnum, On Not Knowing, p.70. 65. In the interview with Katt, she said, ‘I didn’t know [Sunday’s Child] was going to be a book in the beginning’. 66. Rachel Cooke, ‘Sunday’s Child by Serena Katt review – war, propaganda and collective blindness’, Guardian, 30 April 2019 [accessed 13 November 2022]. 67. Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, p.35. 68. Corin Sworn, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (Glasgow, 2017). 69. Corin Sworn cited Anna McNay, Max Mara Prize [accessed 28 June 2015]. 70. There have been various interpretations of the narrative of Martin Guerre, including a novel, a film, and a historical account. 71. Corin Sworn, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (Glasgow, 2017). 72. Laura Cumming, ‘Corin Sworn', Guardian, 24 May 2015 [accessed 30 May 2015]. 73. Cumming, /Corin Sworn/. 74. The Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Curator’s Tour: MaxMara Art Prize for Women: Corin Sworn’, YouTube [accessed 1 June 2015]. 75. Corin Sworn, Interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (Glasgow, 2017). 76. Generation Art Scotland, Corin Sworn [accessed 28 June 2015]. 77. The Whitechapel Gallery, Corin Sworn [accessed 5 June 2015]. 78. It is worth noting that I began the research in 2014 and completed the practical work in October 2016. The Foundling Museum has since addressed this, one example being the exhibition Ladies of Quality & Distinction (Sept 2018 – Jan 2019). 79. Refer to Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’, October, 140, (2012), 91–112, (p. 91). 80. Corin Sworn worked with choreographer Jennifer Essex, costume design students at Wimbledon College of Arts, dancers, a voice actor, and an installation team at the gallery. 81. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p.141. [Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Paris: Gallimard, 1975.] 82. A panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late-eighteenth century and discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish in relation to power and surveillance. 83. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.202.

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84. ‘Blocking’ is a term used in theatre to describe a practice in the rehearsal process when the director determines where the actors should move on stage to ensure the sightlines for the audience, and to ensure that the actor is always lit, according to the lighting design of the scene. 85. John Rouse, ‘Brecht and the Contradictory Actor’, Acting (Re) Considered, ed. Philip B. Zarrilli (London: Routledge, 1995) [1984], p. 240. 86. The wording is taken from the entry form for a child accepted into the Foundling Hospital’s care and used by Charles Dickens in his article ‘Received a Blank Child’, Household Words, London: Bradbury & Evans, March 1853. Dickens writes of the anonymity of each child who was absorbed into the larger social body of the hospital, essentially, disappearing on entrance. 87. Lubaina Himid cited Lubaina Himid, ed. by Micheal Wellen (London: Tate Publishing, 2022) p.82. 88. Lubaina Himid works with found and repurposed wooden drawers – shirt drawers, pencil drawers, paper drawers. 89. House of Illustration [Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration], Engine House offsite Residency 2021: Brief and Guidelines (unpublished, 2021). 90. This text is taken from the caption accompanying the New River Folk exhibition, written by Olivia Ahmad, Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe (2022). 91. A ‘mummers mask’ is worn by an actor in a folk play, or mummers’ play, and it is a tradition in the British Isles. 92. Olivia Ahmad, Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, caption accompanying the New River Folk exhibition. 93. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, Performance, “Contemporary Viewpoints” artists lecture series organised by the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA,  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.  94. A ‘docent’ is a person who acts as a guide, typically in a voluntary basis, in a museum or gallery. It is a title more familiar in the United States, but one frequently used in reference to Museum Highlights. 95. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p.107. 96. Andrea Fraser cited Helen Armitage, ‘Andrea Fraser: Too Shocking for a US Retrospective’, The Culture Trip, 11 January 2017 [accessed 28 June 2015]. 97. Fraser, Museum Highlights, p.108. 98. Sandra Rodrigues, Institutional Critique Verses Institutionalised Critique: The Politics of Andrea Fraser’s Performances [accessed 28 June 2015]. 99. Shannon Jackson, Social Works (London: Routledge, 2011), p.121. 100. Jackson, Social Works, p.121. 101. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Revolution and Revelation’, in Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. by Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p.xiii. 102. Jackson, Social Works, p.121. 103. Jackson, Social Works, p.121. 104. Andrea Fraser, email to Rachel Emily Taylor, 30 January 2023. 105. Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Judgement’, On Understanding Poverty, ed. by Daniel Moynihan (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1969); Fran R. Schumer, Salad and Seurat: Sampling the Fare at Museums, The New York Times, 22 April 1987. 106. MoMA, Andrea Fraser [accessed 1 June 2015]. 84

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107. Andrea Fraser, “What do I, as an artist, provide?”

[accessed 28 June 2015]. 108. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. by John Willett (London: Metheun, 1964), p.198. 109. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre., p.105. 110. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, copseyandcrewe [accessed 2 January 2023]. 111. David Jones was a painter and poet, who was born in Brockley, South East London. In 1909, he went to Camberwell Art School and studied under A. S. Hatrick. He served in World War I on the Western Front in 1915-1918 with the 38th Welsh Division. In 1919, Jones won a government grant to return to Camberwell Art School. He was later commissioned to illustrate a number of books. 112. Haenyeo are female divers in Jeju, whose livelihood consists of harvesting seaweed and shellfish, which they dive for without oxygen masks. They are an important part of the cultural identity and place great importance on the role of women in the community. 113. Rachel Gannon and Mireille Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, p.15.

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Illustration and Historical Collections Illustration and Historical Collections Illustration and Historical Collections Illustration and Historical Collections

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Chapter 3 Illustration and Historical Collections Museums reflect a nostalgia for a past time. Artefacts are carefully organised and labelled; there is a relationship between text (caption, audio guide) and image (the artefact), and this interplay is used to communicate a historical narrative. It is not dissimilar to the way in which illustration functions. Museum captions are often authorless, they may ‘include statements from artists or critics, but their voice is the single, disembodied voice of the museum’, 1 and this unified voice is what Laurajane Smith terms Authorised Heritage Discourse (see pages 21-22). This chapter will explore how an illustrator might disrupt historical collections, with a focus on museums (and archives, see page 94). In these institutions, we may encounter narratives of ownership, memorials for past national identities, hopes for commemoration, and fears of our own death. Museums face a range of struggles, such as the decision of who and what is to be preserved and/or represented, alongside restrictions caused by conservation, pressures from donors, and limitations of funding and space. In the twenty-first century, it is a challenge for museums to ‘elide the fact that an institutional voice has a point of view’.2 A small curatorial decision or an interpretation panel, even a label, can be perceived as a signal to an ideological position. Museums are not neutral spaces. A number of museums place great importance on their apparatus of display, such as cabinets, cases, boxes, and drawers, which enable curators to ‘instil in (the artefacts) layers of meaning’. 3 These curatorial practices can be linked back to the sixteenth-century ‘cabinet of curiosity’, or Wunderkammer, and, even then, the artefacts were arranged to insinuate meaning and educational narratives. These methods of curation are often then adopted by artists and illustrators in their presentation of work, such as Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum (1991-96). This work includes a display of collected objects in 50 boxes, which were originally presented in a vitrine in the Freud Museum, London, and described by the artist as ‘complicating any notion of heritage’.4 (See Figure 3.1). Collections are often built on foundations of colonialism. Many objects acquired by institutions had controversial journeys into the collections. Artefacts may have been taken through brutality, control, and theft. Such items are separated from their original context and can be used in museums to communicate a problematic edited version of history. Politics are in play with the curation of cultures, an example being the British Museum’s exhibition Indigenous Australia (2015), which was criticised for downplaying the brutal treatment of Indigenous Australians, the violent acquisition of Illustration and Historical Collections

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Figure 3.1. Susan Hiller, From the Freud Museum, 1991-6. [Installation shot in Tate Britain, London, 2011]. Photographed by Todd White. Copyright: Estate of Susan Hiller.

objects, and for not featuring Indigenous Australian figures, such as Jandamarra5 (who was thought to have magical powers and led the Bunuba resistance in the late-nineteenth century). This apparent exclusion of particular narratives in order to ‘hide’ them is problematic, especially in a context of ongoing debates on repatriation of collected items. In 2020, the British Museum launched a self-guided tour called Empire and Collecting that aimed to highlight objects predominantly ‘acquired during the age of empire and shows the different, complex and sometimes controversial journeys of objects that would become part of the Museum collection’6 – this is an example of how the British Museum is grappling with its history when it is forbidden to repatriate items from its collection without Government approval.7 Museums are becoming more aware of their complex histories and how they are presented to visitors, and, I would argue, this is one of the reasons behind inviting artists and illustrators to work with collections: to disrupt, to provide an alternative viewpoint, to educate, to create a specific space for self-reflexivity in the museum, and to maintain public trust. The curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Dan Hicks, describes his place of work as ‘not a national museum, but it is a brutish museum. Along with other anthropology museums, it allowed itself to become a militarist vision of White supremacy through the display of the loot of so-called “small wars” in Africa.’8 In his book The Brutish Museums, Hicks writes:

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The museum is not just a device for slowing down time, but also a weapon in its own right, then to what extent are its interventions with time like the brute force of field guns manned by Captain Boisragon’s African forces, carried through the jungle by men selected for their physical strength, a projection across time and space, where some kind of explosion is yet contained in each brass object within this vitrine, unfinished events from which the curator might feel safely out of range, having taken place so far away across time and space: another continent, another millennium? By intervening with time, decelerating memory, displaying loot, what kind of ordnance has the museum brought within its glass cases, caught between one shot and another, between the projection and the return?9

Hicks proposes that museums should redefine themselves as public spaces and sites of conscience. But the race for the decolonisation of collections raises new challenges: obfuscation, tokenism, appropriation, and other ways that violence can persist. 10 These criticisms should be kept in mind by the illustrator when they are invited to comment on these institutions through their practice, and they should avoid obfuscation, tokenism, appropriation — or, if they do employ these, it should be done with intention.

Institutional Critique Illustrators should be conscious of the power dynamics in play in museums, as their work is capable of illuminating the institution’s mechanisms. In art practice, institutional critique is a systematic enquiry into the workings of institutions through creative practice. It is a material form of commentary on an institution that makes historically and socially constructed boundaries visible. The term was coined in the late 1960s when artists began to make work in response to the institutions that exhibited their work. Artist Hans Haacke — whose works include MoMA Poll (1970), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees (1974), MetroMobiltan (1985) — describes his projects as ‘“double-agents” that enter into the institution of art to show that much of what it presents as natural is actually historical and socially constructed’. 11 Artworks such as Haacke’s can demystify power relations in the museum by revealing aspects that might otherwise go unnoticed, such as the relation between museums and their corporate sponsors. Institutional critique is important when considering the potential that the illustrator has when they work with these sites, as well as their ability to draw attention to, and pull apart, the various discourses of heritage — illustrative works can, just as artworks, act as a ‘double-agent’ in the museum.

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A seminal work that employs processes of institutional critique is Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–3), at Maryland Historical Society, (Baltimore, USA). In the work, Wilson questions hidden and marginalised histories through a redisplay of the museum collection, bringing to light the history of Black Americans and Indigenous Americans by drawing attention to their absence. For example, in one of the installations, Wilson displayed a trio of busts of three prominent White men (Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson) alongside three empty pedestals, labelled with the names of important Black historical figures from Maryland’s history (Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Benjamin Banneker) (see Figure 3.2). This act was an exploration of the museum’s choices at the point of acquisition, and an example of who they deemed important and worthy of preservation, placed alongside those who were omitted.

Figure 3.2. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: Pedestals, globe, and busts, 1992-3. Courtesy of the Maryland Centre for History and Culture.

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: ‘Metalwork, 1973-1880’, 1992-3. Courtesy of the Maryland Centre for History and Culture. 92

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In another work, ambiguously labelled Metalwork 1973–1880, Wilson presents slave manacles alongside luxury silverware, and through this curatorial strategy, questions the histories that the Maryland Historical Society were choosing to narrate prior to his intervention (see Figure 3.3). Wilson noted, ‘What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what’s in storage tells you even more.’12 Mining the Museum is an example of how different stories can be told in museums through a redisplay of captions and objects. The work reminds us that museums are curated and have the power to erase experiences from history, and we should question why certain histories have not been given a place in the museum and archives. Through this work, we are made aware of how the juxtaposition of objects, text, and empty spaces in a museum display can encourage an audience to form a different view of the past. Wilson’s practice could be thought of within the frame of curation. It is also comparable to an illustrator working with collections, which might involve the re-arrangement of historical fragments, alongside text, to communicate a message or story. The etymology of ‘curating’ comes from the Latin for ‘care’, curare. Traditionally, a curator was a keeper of cultural heritage at an institution, such as a museum or gallery. They are responsible for cataloguing, managing, assembling, and displaying collections. The role also includes planning for exhibitions, researching the collection, and making decisions on how objects should be interpreted. This may include writing captions and the representation of historical people. In Scotland, ‘curator’ also means the guardian of a child. It is a legal term: a curator ad litem. In this instance, the curator acts independently in the child’s best interest. This is not dissimilar to the concept that heritage is preserved for the sake of ‘future children’ who do not yet exist. Alongside Haacke and Wilson, it is important to acknowledge the work of other practitioners outside illustration who are engaging with museums, as it helps situate our discipline. Notable artists working within this field include Claire Robins, Mark Dion, Hubert Duprat, Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser, Michael Craig-Martin, Willem de Rooij, Andy Goldsworthy, Joseph Kosuth, and Juan Capistran. Interventions by artists in museums often use multimodal means of communication, bringing together text, object, image, display technologies, and performances. Kynaston McShine’s book The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, which was published following an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1999, is a survey of notable examples of museum-related art, and, although it does not aim to achieve an entire overview, it recognises the variety of motives and approaches taken by artists in museums.

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Working with Archives Alongside practitioners working with museums, we will also consider those who work with archives, as they are repositories that house historical collections. There are differences between the two: archives are mainly for academic study and maintain a particular context for the overall collection whereas museums collect specific objects, which are then curated into displays that are often open to the public. Both types of institution undertake the task of preserving the past by acquiring and collating selected historical material. There is also a considerable overlap between the two: a museum can contain an archive,13 although there are archives that are not connected to a museum. 14 Archives are a resource for many artists, including the Blunt Research Group, Sharon Kivland, Susan Hiller, Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, the Atlas Group, and Ilya Kabakov. There has been a notable amount written on artistic interventions in the archive, including Simone Osthoff’s Performing the Archive15 and the Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art Series Edition’s The Archive.16 Hal Foster observed this as an ‘archival impulse’, and practitioners with this tendency ‘seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’,17 often favouring the installation format. An example of this form of practice is Susan Hiller’s aforementioned From the Freud Museum, in which Hiller describes each box as an ‘installation within an installation’.18 Following the publication of Foster’s article An Archival Impulse, Mark Godfrey wrote Artist as Historian (2007), discussing how practitioners use historical research and representation in contemporary art. These practitioners often start their work in the archive, but, unlike Foster’s archival impulse, his concept exclusively relates to artists concerned with historical representation. The works that fall within the role of ‘artist as historian’ often ‘invite viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture’. 19 Godfrey proposes that artists who work in this way can also open up new ways that we can consider our future. Both these terms ‘artist as historian’ and ‘the archival impulse’, could be applied to the illustrators engaging with archives and museums, who I will discuss in this chapter, as well as to the motivations and methods behind their work.

Practitioner Interview: Amy Goodwin amy goodwin  

I've always felt ever since I started working in or studying illustration that, fundamentally, it's about communication and illumination. I think that those two elements within the archival space are really important.

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Illustration has the potential to communicate and illuminate these historical stories to new audiences visually, and they become active then static. I think a lot of the time, archives are quite static or feel unapproachable. But illustration has the potential to make archival material more active and engaging for new audiences. rachel emily taylor  amy goodwin  

Can illustration make archives more accessible?

Yes, definitely, definitely.

The illustrator can ‘activate’ 20 the archive. The archive is a collection of documents. In Archives, Documents, Traces, Paul Ricoeur describes them as a form of institutional activity, writing, ‘discrimination is unavoidable – what should be conserved, what thrown away?’ 21 Archives are an ‘authorised deposit’22 that allow us to view the aims of the institution. In his book Mal d’archive : Une impression Freudian ( Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression ), Jacques Derrida uses Freud’s concept of the ‘death drive ’ as central to his reading of the archive and the act of archiving — the ‘death drive’ is a tendancy towards self-destruction through aggression, repetition, or compulsion. There is an ‘archive fever’, which he describes as: To burn with passion. It is to never rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no mal-de can arise from a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive.23

The French en mal de doesn’t have a direct translation to English, but it alludes to an obsession to the point of malady. An archive is an external place that — through repetitive behaviours — leads to a memorialisation. The archive is ‘never closed’ and an archivist ‘works feverishly’.24 Freud himself said, ‘A collection to which there are no additions is really dead.’ 25 The artists and illustrators who work with an archive tend to privilege the historical document, but each archival fragment contains within it a narrative, and it is from these histories that further histories can be built. Through their practice, the illustrator can allow for a representation of history and hitherto neglected narratives. But there are ethical implications to working with archival material; the documents should be treated with care, both physically ( not damaging the document) and morally ( how / if one misrepresents the document and why ).

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The Residency An illustrator can work with an archive or museum as part of an artist residency, allowing them to access the collection, placing themselves inside the institution rather than outside. This can enable a level of trust and friendship to develop between the illustrator and the staff team, which can be woven into the project and the research. Illustrator Leah Fusco worked with Bexhill Museum as part of her PhD,26 and during her project she was made a patron of the museum. This relationship ‘didn’t change the direction’ of her project, but it allowed her to explore ‘creative strategies and interpretation’,27 and knowledge was generated in these events that enriched her work. If an illustrator responds to the collection without the knowledge of the institution, they can enter under cover. This might allow the practitioner more freedom if their intention is to be critical of the institution. But this can add restrictions to the research and the prevention of access to objects held in storage. If this was part of a larger research project, they would be at risk of undertaking covert research.28 Artists have engaged with ‘unofficial’ interventions, such as Juan Capistran’s The Breaks (2000), a break-dancing performance held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art on Carl Andre’s lead floor piece, in the moments that the security guards left the gallery space. Nick Cass has researched artist interventions in museums, authoring Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces 29 and Contemporary Art and Heritage: Interventions at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.30 From his research, he noted that a number of artists who participated in residencies (at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth) have intervened with the archive in some way. Every artist was granted permission to work with the museum as part of their Contemporary Art Programme — it is not ‘covert research’.

Practitioner Interview: Nick Cass rachel emily taylor 

Nick, you have explored artist interventions at historical sites and questioned how art practice can disrupt — rather than enforce — dominant heritage narratives. You have focused on the Brontë Parsonage Museum in your research, and so, in your opinion, what would be the benefit or purpose of this disruption? What could it add?

nick cass  

That is a really good question. I think the reason why the Brontë Parsonage Museum is a good example of this [a site with interventions], is because they’ve had a consistent programme over quite a number of years. But it is also a difficult question, because how do you measure the ‘benefit of the disruption’, where is it? In the individual visitor or the approach of staff? And, of course, it’s all those things—

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rachel emily taylor 

I’ll just pick up on that comment because the idea of ‘measuring’ something in relation to arts and heritage is something I have always found problematic, and hard to navigate, as both a practitioner and a researcher. I know that you were linked to the Newcastle University’s Mapping Contemporary Art in the Heritage Experience (2017–20) and that measuring — and evaluating — was involved in that research project …

nick cass  

Yes, it was, and it came with similar sorts of challenges. That project can help me frame quite a concrete answer in some ways, as the benefit [of intervention] is to make it easier to see that heritage is an ‘active process’. In somewhere like a writer’s house [the Brontë Parsonage Museum] it is very easy to see things as fixed, because month on month, year on year, there is little change in curatorial practice. There is the sense that the dining room looks the same now as it did ten years ago. To engage with heritage, I think that contemporary art really helps to communicate that heritage is active, because there are the artists engaging with what it means today.

rachel emily taylor 

I know this is quite an open-ended question, but it’s something that I’ve been considering. Does an artwork or illustration have to be situated at the historical site to be able to disrupt these dominant heritage narratives?

nick cass  

So, there’s a really simple answer: no.

rachel emily taylor 

Yes, I do agree. I was coming across artworks that disrupted heritage narratives, but they might be in a gallery rather than a museum, like Corin Sworn’s Silent Sticks at the Whitechapel Gallery.

nick cass  

The short answer is ‘no’; the longer answer is, ‘of course, often things are commissioned to be seen in a particular context’. So, the question is ‘how do they work when they’re not in that context?’ It’s that issue around site-specificity, really. I think there is a great opportunity to think about what the combination of art and heritage is and where that can be shown.

rachel emily taylor 

When working as a practitioner, I see myself as working within the heritage process. But often in conversations I have had with others, particularly heritage practitioners, they often see practitioners as positioned outside of this process. I wondered if you had a take on that?

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nick cass  

I do. It’s a very interesting one because it is even in the way that these are presented and the way that they’re curated. The way that the language is used to describe them, that ‘this is art’ and ‘this is heritage’, and so the whole structure of it creates the division. Now, I think it would be interesting to not use the language of contemporary art at all. In some ways, it’s a false narrative to say that it’s contemporary art intervening in heritage. I’m going to use this example, because I’ve been thinking about it this morning: Sue Blackwell’s work at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2010 was a brilliant way to provide an interpretation of the children’s creativity. Her paper sculptures were installed in a variety of places in the museum and were very evidently contemporary art, but they told really clear stories about the rooms they occupied. It is really easy to see that that is a clear piece of heritage interpretation and art. So, I think the answer is that it’s both and it’s not either/or.

rachel emily taylor 

There is potential in exploring how we use terminology, communication, and language when describing creative work in future heritage projects. Then, perhaps, the artwork or illustrations could be described as a form of heritage in itself. In your research, you write that artwork can be ‘dialogic heritage’, could you expand on that?

nick cass  

In trying to unpack the idea of an encounter in heritage space, there is a question of who the agents are in that conversation. At the Brontë Parsonage Museum, for example, if we ask the question who is participating in a conversation in that moment? then we can think of the Brontës themselves, and conversations taking place across time. The Brontës are often invoked when disapproval is expressed by visitors, such as, ‘Charlotte would not like this’, or, ‘they wouldn’t approve’. In a sense, the Brontës are still active in the conversations that people have about what takes place in that house. So, I guess what I was thinking about was that sense of who are the participants in the conversations?

rachel emily taylor 

Often, we’re working with people who might no longer be with us. How do we morally and ethically work with the histories of people who aren’t here, like the Brontës?

nick cass  

Yeah, and it comes back to this idea of language. This contemporary art is coming in to ‘intervene’ and ‘the Brontës wouldn’t like it’.

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You know, the Brontës will be mortified to know that their stockings are on display in a glass case. Can you imagine what they would say about that? They would love art being in their house. But their clothing being on display for scrutiny, I think they would be more mortified about that, to be honest.

Cass suggests we should view the relationship between art and heritage as a ‘dialogue’ as it ‘offers a “place between” art and heritage, between the “past and present”, and between the “relationships people create”’. 31 In the process of making and presenting the work, there is a consideration of who is involved in the communication. Alongside this, there are questions of terminology when working with museums: how is the work presented to an audience, does the caption label it as art, heritage, or interpretation? Artists and illustrators can use their practice to play with formats of communication in the museum. For her intervention Appointment (1999) at the Freud Museum (London, UK), Sophie Calle added new captions to the museum, working on hot pink cards. Her narratives, communicated through the captions, tell stories of shoplifted red shoes, love letters, her wedding in a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas. She also added objects to disrupt the existing displays in the museum, such as her wedding dress, which she draped over Freud’s psychoanalytic couch (see Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4. Sophie Calle, Appointment, 1999. Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Paula Cooper Gallery. Copyright: Sophie Calle. Illustration and Historical Collections

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In 2015, when I undertook a residency at The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, I worked with the museum’s archive to explore the original, waterdamaged captions that were written by the founder, Cecil Williamson. I retyped the captions, which had been damaged by a flood in 2004 — copying the grammar, spelling, and layout of the originals — before leaving them in the surrounding landscape of the museum, at thirty separate locations, effectively taking the museum into the landscape. The aim behind using the recognisable format of the caption was to subvert Authorised Heritage Discourse. Alongside disrupting the ‘caption-object’ communication method in museums, the museum tour can be appropriated. Examples of this in practice are Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights (1989) (see pages 68-69) and Little Frank and His Carp (2001).32 Claire Robins also used this format in her work An Elite Experience for Everyone (2005), which was set at the William Morris Gallery (London, UK). Robins performed a character that allowed for a pedagogical experience of the collection. Comparable to Fraser’s Jane Castleton character from Museum Highlights, Robins performed a parodic, guided tour conducted by the character, Victoria Fielding.

Illustration Practitioner as Historian

Illustrator Catherine Anyango Grünewald begins her work by drawing from archival imagery,33 but recontextualises well-known photographs, with the aim of drawing attention to often unspoken narratives. Her work could be compared to Godfrey’s 'artist as historian', as she makes new connections to enable a reader to reconsider how past events have been represented, influencing how they might act in the future. I met with Anyango Grünewald to discuss her aims and processes. In particular, how she worked on her graphic novels The Heart of Darkness (2010), Scandorama (2010), and Dead Man Walking (2025).34 We spoke about her aims and motivations behind Last Seen (2013), a series of graphite drawings made in response to CCTV footage and police photography of the last recorded image of a person before or at the moment of their disappearance or death.

Practitioner Interview: Catherine Anyango Grünewald rachel emily taylor 

What intentions do you have when you work with historical imagery in the creation of your work?

catherine anyango grünewald  

I usually try to use well-known photographs, because I think those photographs are how people engage with these histories and how they imagine the past. I also think that people are desensitised to these photos, and if

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they engage with the past through these photographs – which are ‘iconic’ and ‘untouchable’ – then they don't really think so much about the actual reality of that situation. When using these images in an ‘illustrated way’, or by re-engaging with them with visual language, you can reinvigorate the way people see them and lead them to question what they think of that photograph. I also think that the subjects in these photos that we know so well are stripped of their individuality because they become ‘icons’. I’m really interested in the idea of working against these stereotypes in historical pictures and, instead, trying to create a sense that these people are individuals – bringing them back to a sense of being a person. rachel emily taylor 

You’re working with these well-known images, you are using illustration practice to translate them or show them in a new light, and, through this process, they are integrated into your work. Do you draw scenes and figures from these images?

catherine anyango grünewald  

Usually, I use them as references, but I am also trying to make people think about the context that they’re seeing them in. For example, we see these images in certain contexts (like in archives or in documentaries) and, when they are used, they tend to be used individually. They represent individual things. But with illustration, you can put things next to each other in different ways. For example, in the Dead Man Walking (which I’m working on now), I am including a lynching image, and we’re used to seeing this lynching image, but we’re not used to seeing it in relationship to other images, we are used to seeing them in isolation, like all iconic images. I contextualised the lynching here with Sister Helen 35 narrating her experience of witnessing violence against a Black woman on a bus, while the White passengers turn and look away. On the right-hand side of the spread a young Sister Helen swings innocently from the same tree as the lynching (see Figure 3.5). With this repositioning, we understand that these two separate iconic images of the bus passengers and the lynching have a relationship. It was not something that was, you know, they were here, and this was somewhere else. The White people on the bus actively ignored the violence taking place. The violence was happening in the same landscape as Sister Helen’s innocent life. By putting that image in the same space as that lynching photograph, you can kind of trace a path of this one simple act of violence being ignored and on to this huge act of violence, also being ignored. Illustration and Historical Collections

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Figure 3.5. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Dead Man Walking, published by Random House, 2020. rachel emily taylor 

If I understand this correctly, you use two historical images and put them adjacent to one other to draw a comparison, or to create meaning?

catherine anyango grünewald  

Yes, exactly. The lynching photo is never shown alongside a photograph of White people, for example, doing normal things. I have one imagined image of Sister Helen, the narrator, on the swing, and one image that I’ve drawn from archival bus photos: both images parenthesise the lynching photo, to draw attention to the fact that there was ignorance, or an avoidance. With illustration, you can organise information in a certain way to create links between things, or to emphasise a narrative that is not implied in the original photograph, in this case that ignorance or avoidance can lead to violence. I really like using the relationship of photography to illustration: photography can be used to construct a certain image of a person or event; illustration, in a subjective way, can also deconstruct that image. This reminds me of your essay Re-collecting Memory. In it, you wrote about residual haunting and that, when a traumatic event occurs, it can leave a ‘scar’.36 I was reflecting on this while you were talking.

rachel emily taylor 

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Figure 3.6. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Mike Brown, 2015. [Animation stills from Live, Moments Ago (the death of Mike Brown)].

In your work Last Seen, you work with CCTV imagery of past crimes, I wanted to ask you about this work and how you translate these photographs into your work? (See Figure 3.6). catherine anyango grünewald  

I’m really interested in the idea of haunting as a scientific or social concept. The idea that ‘energy’ remains in a place. There might be this energy that is left in a place where something very violent has occurred; a sort of invisible, dangerous energy that can affect the way people in that space interact, as well as future events. It is not a ghost. In a sense, it’s a way that people relate to each other in these spaces that I'm talking about. There is more tension, more surveillance, more distrust, more fear. This is how I think violent events ‘scar’ the landscape. You could see that, for example, in the aftermath of the death of Mike Brown [in 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Missouri, USA]. What happens after police shootings? Someone is shot and then there is such a ferocious outpouring of energy, of riots and fires. I feel like this is the energy feeding into people and I wanted to recreate these images so they have this additional subjective layer.

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When drawing the images, I also subvert the expectations of the material I am using, because I am literally destroying the paper by working over and over it. Paper is something that we use to make records, it is a bureaucratic object. We tend to think that, when you make a drawing, it should remain archived. It should remain whole and perfect. If you make a drawing that is actually destroying itself, I feel like that lets you see beyond the layer of the photograph and into that haunted feeling of that space. rachel emily taylor 

Your paper becomes ‘scarred’ by the marks you make — so, the actual surface of the paper is scarred by the marks you make?

catherine anyango grünewald  

Yes, the drawing takes off the top layer of paper, so you see what is underneath. It relates to the idea of something being there that might not actually be seen.

rachel emily taylor 

I was interested in how illustrators, like yourself, are navigating these past events in the present day. Their work can inform our understanding of ourselves and our future-selves.

catherine anyango grünewald  

I think memory and the way we remember things affects reality. You see that in any conflict. The way that things are remembered is linked to who was recording that information at the time. These memories don’t really stay in the past, but they can affect how we treat individuals and cultures in the present. It is always good to continually revisit and unpick and try to understand how things were recorded, why they’re recording, and who is recording them. In my own research I am interested in the crossover of science and law with the concept of representation, specifically with ethnographic and criminal photographs. There seems to be this obsession with the possibility of classifying and controlling the visual representation of people for the confirmation of prejudice. Archival images or ethnographic images and criminal images are also about classification. So the ethnographic images of the Congolese I referred to in Heart of Darkness, the booklet ‘Swedish Folk Types’, published in 1919, by the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene that I referred to in Scandorama, and the idea of the mugshot are all about using photography to classify and surveil a ‘subject’ without their consent. I think if photography can be used to construct a certain image of a person, illustration, being subjective and intentional, can be used to deconstruct it as well. In a way, the illus-

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trated versions may be closer to reality or humanity of a person or an event than the photograph. As John Berger said: ‘The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.’37

Anyango Grünewald’s work demonstrates how archival images can be reframed and interpreted through illustration. Comparable to Katt’s Sunday’s Child (see page 52-57), Anyango Grünewald explores how the synthesis of historical material in her compositions can help form new narratives. By bringing together ‘iconic’ historical images, and placing them adjacent to one another, her work allows for a reader to find new meaning. This is not dissimilar to Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, with its juxtaposition of the shackles alongside the silverware, which could be compared to Dead Man Walking, and the combination of the image of the White people on the bus alongside the image of the lynching. Anyango Grünewald’s illustrations deconstruct previously held understandings, and allow a reader to view them in a new format, rather than when clouded by previously thought of ideas and misconceptions. This demonstrates the power of illustration to create new narratives with archival material.

Figure 3.7. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Heart of Darkness, published by SelfMadeHero, 2010.

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Figure 3.8. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Heart of Darkness, published by SelfMadeHero, 2010.

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I want to pull out a key thought from my conversation with Anyango Grünewald: ‘It is always good to continually revisit and unpick and try to understand how things were recorded, why they’re recording, and who is recording them.’ These ideas are key when working with heritage and when challenging Authorised Heritage Discourse. An illustrator can make a new ‘recording’, and the work will be a form of critique, but context must be kept in mind. How is a historian, museum, or archive recording historical data and artefacts? Why have these items or viewpoints been chosen over another? Who holds the power?

Gathering, Assembling, and Interpreting Illustrators gather and interpret historical traces. This process could be compared to archaeologists, who wash, sort, catalogue, and store artefacts that they recover from sites, before using them to piece together information about the past. In Theatre/Archaeology, Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson write how ‘assemblage’ is one of archaeology’s constituting practices, and is the method of grouping together different artefacts found in association with one another. They outline four ‘overlapping’ methods used for this investigation: ↦ Empirical association (the original archaeological concept of assemblage); things found together. Methods: inductive reasoning, statistical analysis (based upon data definition, collection and classification) – looking for patterns in material. ↦ Logical links between things Methods: structuralist readings, formal or mathematical analysis of patterning and design — determining an algebra of patterns of association. ↦ Conceptual alignment, casual relationships, narrative emplotment Methods: historical and social interpretation, semiotics, deductive reasoning –forging links in the patterning. ↦ Creative elaboration; further exploration of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche Methods: speculative modelling or abduction — electro-cultural articulations. 38 Illustrators may be working with these methods of ‘assembly’ instinctively, but they can be intentionally integrated into research practice. Assemblage is descriptive of how historical narratives can be constructed from parts. Sometimes the historical records and objects they link together have a clearly defined relationship. In other instances, it can be tangential. I would suggest this word is used when describing the illustrator’s process of

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working with archival material in the outcome. Assemblage is also a word used by Rodney Harrison to describe the ‘regime of care’ 39 of heritage-making (see page 21). Illustration Practitioner as Assembler

There are a number of illustrators who work with archives in the creation of their work. To name a few: Jhinuk Sarkar undertook a residency at Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery (Warwickshire, UK) to explore whether historical artefacts could be more engaging for visitors if accompanied by traditional museum captions that include illustrations (2015). Esther McManus worked with maps and archival documentation in The Senate House Library in London as part of her work for the ‘Stray Voices’ project,40 titled Elsewhere (2018). As part of her practice-based PhD, titled Don’t Believe the Papers (2020), Mireille Fauchon interpreted a Holloway prison diary containing the life writings of the Croydon Suffragette Katie Gliddon, which is held by The Women’s Library in London. Isabel Greenberg worked with the library collection at the Brontë Parsonage Museum when working on her graphic novel Glass Town (2020) (see Figure 3.9). While working with the National Fairground and Circus Archive (NFCA) (University of Sheffield, UK) as part of her PhD titled The Archive as an Illustrated Space for Disputed, ‘Dubious’ and Hidden Narratives (2020), Amy Goodwin used signwriting to illustratively tell stories about the lives of fairground females. Miriam Elgon worked with the Victoria & Albert Museum Archive (London, UK) and the National Fairground and Circus Archive (NFCA) to explore the lives of marginalised circus performers for the picturebook Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal (2019) (see Figure 3.10). Practitioner Interview: Miriam Elgon miriam elgon  

Pablo Fanque is a real figure. The seed of the idea came from research. I was searching for a story and trawling through digital archives, Black cultural archives – all sorts of material. I was on the hunt for a picture book story that could be relevant and contemporary, in terms of representation and social justice. But I also wanted something historical and fantastical. Using archives is my answer to some eternal illustrator questions. The types of question that arise when you are creating or interpreting stories far beyond your own experience: how do you visualise things that you’ve never seen? How do you visualise somewhere that you can’t go? You’re engaged in an extensive, elaborate ‘piecing together’. I was looking at different research and archival sources to give me different pieces of the whole picture: an image might give

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Figure 3.9. Isabel Greenberg, Glasstown, published by Jonathan Cape, 2020.

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Figure 3.10. Miriam Elgon, Fablo Fanque’s Circus Royal Picturebook [cover design], 2019.

me some concrete physical details; a film might help me capture activity and movement; sound might give me a sense of mood and atmosphere, etc. Overall, I’m interested in trying to create a real feeling of time and place, but real in the sense that it’s evocative, not necessarily accurate. I think a lot about what Susan Sontag says about the sensibility of an era in Notes on "Camp", that it’s decisive and perishable.41 rachel emily taylor 

So, you had this idea for your picturebook, and you found this historical figure, Pablo Fanque, who became the basis for your story. Did you find much information about him in the archives, or were there gaps?

miriam elgon  

Massive gaps, massive. So, first I came across the pictures of Pablo Fanque. There were one or two photos, and they

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were really striking. They were Victorian, black and white photos, showing a type of historical figure I felt I’d seldom seen before – a Black man with amazing hair and this fantastic, more showy version of an Isambard-Kingdom-Brunel-like suit. I was like, ‘Who’s this …? Who is this?!’ It was a side of Victorian Britain that I’d never seen before, and definitely not at school.

Figure 3.11. Miriam Elgon, Fablo Fanque’s Circus Royal Picturebook, 2019. Illustration and Historical Collections

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Figure 3.12. Miriam Elgon, Fablo Fanque’s Circus Royal Picturebook, 2019.

There were these photos and some drawings and prints of Pablo Fanque performing. He was a performer before he was a circus proprietor. In some of the Victoria & Albert Museum Archive material, there are photos of him on a horse in a circus ring. Apart from these visual fragments, there was also some autobiographical material, but it was all quite speculative … rachel emily taylor 

From what you’re saying, it feels like illustration and your practice acts as a ‘mesh’ to weave archival ‘threads’ together, allowing for some gaps to remain, but pulling together moments that haven’t yet been captured?

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miriam elgon  

Yeah – yes, it does. The limited images and the debatable facts, in combination with extensive research, allowed me to imagine, to build a world and imagine what the past and the life of this man might have been like.

rachel emily taylor 

I was thinking about historical re-enactments and performance. Perhaps illustration is performing a moment in time. It’s enabling you to imagine what that moment might have been like. The illustration is acting as a stand-in performer, allowing us to access a sense of the past … Illustration as a historical re-enactment is a form of heritage, and you are not trying to capture a truthful moment, but is it a process of working with these historical stories to make a commentary on the present?

miriam elgon 

Definitely. I was engaging with the audience of now, thinking of what they need and current issues with representation in children’s books. Non-White characters are underrepresented generally, but particularly in stories that are historical or magical. There’s a great book that explores this in books for a slightly older age bracket: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ The Dark Fantastic.42

Figure 3.13. Miriam Elgon, Fablo Fanque’s Circus Royal Picturebook, 2019. Illustration and Historical Collections

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rachel emily taylor 

Illustration might highlight or draw attention to a singular person yet tell a story that might apply to a larger or group experience. In your book, was the focus on Pablo Fanque, or on other circus workers who were active at the same time?

miriam elgon  

Yes, it’s one story, but one of many. In telling this story, I was looking to include people that haven’t been included in the picturebook tradition and history. Also, the tone of story was important. Pablo Fanque was a Black man in Victorian Britain who was an amazing success for years and years and years, so there was potential for joy within the story. The joyful portrayal of a Black figure is valuable, and rarer than you might think. I often think about Sarfraz Manzoor, I remember reading an article where he talks about equity and equality being stories about Brown and Black people that aren’t always extreme and aren’t always negative. The positive experiences, the joyful experiences, that’s the kind of story you’re missing and the ones I missed reading when I was growing up. Even as a kid, I registered the fact that people like me were absent, and if we were present, then we were having a terrible time. The message seemed to be that being Brown or Black meant endless challenges that you needed to prepare yourself for. And although the challenges are real, it feels equally necessary and powerful to say, ‘Do you know what? It’s also wonderful!’ Tyler Mitchell, the photographer, talks about Black beauty as an act of resistance. In this, he most probably means physical beauty and style, but I think the idea has a wider application — beauty and joy in a broader sense, as acts of defiance.44

Elgon’s working process acts as a ‘mesh’ that weaves historical moments together to allow for a reader to experience a sense of the time, but a sense that is not necessarily accurate. Her picturebook, Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal, uses drawing and image-making to tell an alternative version of the past, raising an otherwise overlooked historical figure into the foreground – a practice that would fall under Godfrey’s 'artist as historian'. There is also an important aspect relating to social justice. Elgon approached her project in response to childhood experiences of not seeing anyone ‘like her’ represented in picturebooks. The project documents the power that illustration practice has in retelling and reshaping perspectives of the past, allowing for historical figures, like Pablo Fanque, to reclaim a space for their stories to be told — particularly when there is a lack of photography or written documentation that supports their story. Amy Goodwin also worked with the National Fairground and Circus Archive. Her intention was to use illustration practice to focus on the role of fairground females in the twentieth century, particularly those that had 114

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not been given the historical attention she felt they deserved. Both Elgon and Goodwin worked with archives for their research, but, as Goodwin is part of the fairground community and an ‘inside researcher’,45 she used her position to conduct interviews and oral history research. This connection could be considered a privilege, as it allows for experience and access to this specific community. Goodwin aimed to illustratively tell stories about the lives of specific fairground females: Lizzie, Martha, Sophie, Annie, and Elizabeth (the project also includes a non-human female, Lizzie, who was an elephant).

Practitioner Interview: Amy Goodwin amy goodwin  

For the majority of my life, l have been embedded in travelling fairground heritage. I have been hearing stories of women or females orally passed down over generations. These stories were fascinating, but in no way were they validated and confirmed. Obviously, due to the nature of oral history, there was a chance that they may have been taken out of context or exaggerated. These stories led to a particular focus in the role that fairground females, in particular those within the first half of the twentieth century, played, and how pivotal this was to the success of their families and their businesses. But, moreover, how they were so absent within the historical record and almost hidden within the fairground community itself. There was no record of them in the National Fairground and Circus Archive, housed at the University of Sheffield, despite their huge wealth of photographic material and a complete collection of The World’s Fair, the weekly fairground newspaper that has been running since 1906. But, if you search any female names at the archive, it doesn't come up with anything about them — it just says ‘not catalogued’, and the photograph captions state ‘unknown woman’. In comparison, the men have agency: you can locate fragments of their lives [in the archive, and beyond — within the fairground community itself]. For the PhD, the emphasis was on making illustrative spaces, using my craft of signwriting, in particular, fairground signwriting. The colours of the signs created are inspired by traditional fairgrounds, but use illustrative language to construct ‘the archive as illustrated space’ (a concept I developed initially as a theoretical framework and later tested in practice). Here, I worked to re-establish the identities of these five selected females, all of whom worked in the twentieth century, highlighting the crossovers and coincidences between the five of them.

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Figure 3.14. Amy Goodwin, Sophie: Colourful Language [Installation Shot], 2019.

The first half of the PhD was a research enquiry: collating oral history from descendants of the females, from people who’d heard stories of them and from people who dealt with them in business. To validate this material, I paired it with analysis of archival photographs and articles from The World’s Fair, newspaper fragments when either the females themselves or the fairgrounds they were associated with, were mentioned. This gave me a rigorous grounding, and, from there, in the second half of the PhD, I constructed life stories that informed the creation of the illustrated spaces – visually depicting fragments of the females’ lives. 116

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rachel emily taylor 

Do you think your illustration practice acted as a ‘glue’, or as a way to join the dots?

amy goodwin  

Yes, it was about acknowledging those absences and maintaining the absences. So, for example, with the design of the life stories, it was important to leave space where there were gaps in the historical record that I hadn’t been able to fill, and they were still visible as gaps – effectively, giving space to the absences, making the absences visible. Through this idea of absence within presence, or vice versa, presence within absence, it was really important to highlight those nuances or moments when we don’t know what they were doing. But, regardless of that, they still should have some form of authority or presence within not just the fairground archive, but the established historical record. It became important in the PhD that I had no bias to any one of them. So, it felt important that they took up space equally, regardless of how much material I had uncovered about them – I’d not collated an equal amount for each female, some were talked about more in our history than others. But it became important that they all had their own space and they were treated as equal. The design of the life stories equated to the same physical mass, regardless of the amount of content. Each physical illustrated space contained the same number of signs, so it was methodical and unbiased in that approach.

Figure 3.15. Amy Goodwin, The Unveiling of Sophie: Her fine reputation, edged in profanity [Sign 1a. from Sophie, Colourful Language], 2019.

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Figure 3.16. Amy Goodwin, Prowling Martha's Underhand Target [Sign 3 from Martha: Mesmeric Subject], 2019.

Figure 3.17. Amy Goodwin, The Fine Quality of Annie: Feast your Eyes! [Sign. 5b. from Annie: Challenging Patrons], 2019. 118

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rachel emily taylor 

A question I often ask myself is, ‘What is the illustrator’s position in relation to history? ’ I find it interesting that you are from a similar background to the fairground females in your work. Do you have any thoughts on this relationship?

amy goodwin  

Yes, I deliberately didn’t re-establish the identity of anyone that I’m related to, because of the bias factor. But I was very aware that my position was as an 'inside researcher’ because, without the upbringing, I wouldn’t have been afforded the contact and they wouldn't have spoken to somebody that wasn’t of that heritage. I was definitely in this position where I was able to access the material, the oral history material; they would speak to me, and they allowed me to respond to the material in my illustration work. Whilst I felt it was important that I was talking to women for my research, it wasn’t deliberate, and I wasn’t selective over that. It’s almost a coincidence that I was talking predominantly to women, and they really recognised the importance, because they felt like they weren’t acknowledged either. It’s quite interesting. Despite talking about things that were happening a hundred years ago, the problem is still the same. They’re still not recognised in that industry for their role. A role that’s still not being archived. I wanted to begin to change that. So, yes, it was about positionality and that’s why the methods were so important, so that it didn’t become biased.

rachel emily taylor 

Through your research into the past, you have been talking to these contemporary women, and it has revealed similar problems that are happening now. The work is relevant today. Can you see the contemporary problem in the historical story?

amy goodwin  

Yes, definitely. A lot of the time, I would go and talk to them about their grandmothers or great-grandmothers and, after the conversation, they’d ask, ‘When are you coming back to talk about my mother or me?’ They wanted me to bring it forward in time, but I couldn’t within the remit of the PhD enquiry. I’d partly focused on this specific timeframe because a lot happened in society: two world wars, the Suffragette Movement, the Great Depression. It felt important to show, to an audience outside of the fairground community, the impact of these recognisable events – as a way of engaging the audience, hooking them into the material. But, you know, it would be a dream to carry on with the project, but bring it forward in time and interview the same women about themselves and today.

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When working as an inside researcher, it is important to be aware of bias and positionality. A historian would aim to gather data from multiple sources before forming an opinion. Goodwin’s bias could be towards the people being represented in her work, or a relationship to an institution, for example. She attempted to navigate this by ensuring that each fairground female ‘had their own space’ and was ‘treated as equal’. She also did not focus on anyone from her own family history, which enabled her to maintain some critical distance. Goodwin visually depicted fragments of the lives of the fairground females by painting signs and creating spaces that they might have occupied; like setting a stage before the actor enters. Rather than visually depicting historical people, the words and fragments allow an audience to imagine who they might have been. Comparisons could be drawn here to Copsey and Crewe’s New River Folk (see pages 62-70), and how illustrative objects can give the historical person presence without them physically appearing. This could be linked to the idea that the objects we own and spaces we inhabit will outlive us, and these things become significant after the owner has died, when they become laden with sentimental value. The work allowed Goodwin to reflect on the present: ‘Things that were happening 100 years ago, the problem is still the same […] and I wanted to change that,’ she said. This shows the power of using the past to allow us to reflect on problems that might be occurring now. For example, in my own work at the Foundling Museum, I was attempting to represent the foundling children, as I perceived them to be missing. But, in so doing, the contemporary children I worked with also disappeared, and, although it was not for the same reasons (university research ethics protecting each child’s identity), the outcome allowed for an audience to draw comparisons between the two sets of children. Illustration Practitioner as Guide

Priya Sundram and Nia Thandapani (Studio Carrom) were the William Morris Gallery’s Artists in Residence between 2018–19. The gallery is situated in Lloyd Park, Walthamstow, and is housed in the ‘Water House’, formerly the Morris family home from 1848 to 1856. The artists used the residency to interrogate Morris’s links with South Asia, and to examine how designs and motifs from the Indian subcontinent were influential in his designs. The residency led to an exhibition funded by the gallery, which allowed for a collaboration between the gallery and the local South Asian community, where almost a quarter of the residents in the borough are Muslim, according to the 2011 census.46

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Practitioner Interview: Studio Carrom priya sundram  

When we visited the William Morris Gallery, one thing that was blatantly clear was that it was a really White space, even though the gallery, in Lloyd Park, Walthamstow, is in a really multicultural area. There is a Big South Asian community around there and we just felt it was kind of shocking how White the audience was on our numerous visits to the museum. To give you a little context, the William Morris Gallery has

Figure 3.18. Studio Carrom, Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia, 2021. Photographed by Felicity Crawshaw.

eight galleries/rooms each relating to a part of Morris’s life or practice. Gallery four — the ‘workshop gallery’ — which is inspired by Morris & Co’s Merton workshop, has these incredible printing blocks that are from Morris’ time. The room also has a lot of block-printed fabric, which is very common in South Asia and is a technique still commonly used there. Seeing this, we felt there were a number of connections we could draw out which spoke to South Asian culture — directly and indirectly. Some were very specific. For example, within the gallery, there were pieces of South Asian fabric with little or no information placed within the collection. A caption would tell you to look at the similarities between a piece of South Asian fabric and a Illustration and Historical Collections

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piece of Morris fabric. But then what are you supposed to do? Why was the caption giving us that prompt but no information on why or what it means? We just felt there was this huge part of the narrative missing. We wanted to bring these two worlds together, somehow. From an illustration and design perspective, both Nia and I are really big fans of Morris, and we thought, this is the kind of problem we would like to address. We based the residency proposal around the swatch of South Asian fabric — and I might let you jump in, here, Nia … nia thandapani  

Well, picking up from that: there was a piece of fabric that seemed like a little taster of something that you couldn’t find anywhere else in the gallery. It was also in a drawer, so it was physically hidden. You had to discover it.

rachel emily taylor  

So, there wasn’t that much importance placed on this fabric sample, and that struck you as something that needed to be criticaly unpicked?

Figure 3.19. Studio Carrom, Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia, 2021. Photographed by Felicity Crawshaw.

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nia thandapani  

Our work typically has a South Asia–UK connection, so we were interested in drawing out these connections within the gallery, and we understood that Morris was living in this time of Empire, which framed any specific connections this collection might have had. The drawer at the gallery left so much unsaid. Why does the William Morris Gallery have a piece of block printed Indian fabric in their collection? Who collected it? Where did the fabric come from? How old is it? It raised a number of questions. Another larger conversation that was happening around the time of the residency was that of decolonisation and museum practice. Entering any museum with an interest in South Asia meant we had this in our minds as well, and this particular residency felt like an opportunity to explore this within the gallery context. So, the proposal that we put forward suggested that the William Morris Gallery should be placed within this larger conversation, and that we should interrogate these currently untold narratives within the space.

rachel emily taylor  

The project could be seen as viewing the collection with a contemporary lens, and this allows you to think about the audience of today, and what could draw the people in the local community to the gallery. It is as if you’re both ‘activating’ and bringing the collection more up to date, would you agree?

priya sundram  

That was definitely an intention, and we tried to do that in a few different ways. We wanted the work to reflect the diverse local community, and to look at ways in which we could reframe the collection to make it relevant for a different audience. One thing that struck us was its location directly next to the Tamil temple,47 and we were interested in the proximity of these two sites and how to bring these worlds together. During the residency, we reached out to the temple to start a conversation, and they were incredibly welcoming and generous.

rachel emily taylor  

It sounds like there might have been a disconnect between the gallery and its immediate surroundings …

nia

thandapani  

The journalist Navid Akhtar, who grew up in Walthamstow, has spoken eloquently about this at the William Morris Gallery: about who is in the gardens and local area, and who feels they can cross the threshold into the building; that there may be invisible barriers to stepping into the gallery for many people in the community. The gallery team know this. But, within the gallery, in the actual space itself, what is being Illustration and Historical Collections

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said in that space, and the way that it was all set up, these elements were not yet reflective of this understanding. priya sundram  

Yeah. It’s not just an issue for the William Morris Gallery. I think there’re a lot of galleries and museums that deal with this, because they are grand imposing spaces that are not very welcoming, and, actually, a lot of people don’t know that they’re allowed to go in for free, or feel that they don’t really belong in that space. I think that, when you don’t often see any of your heritage, you don’t feel like it's a space for you. So, there's a number of barriers. How do you break those down?

nia thandapani  

The proposal for the residency didn’t actually require any outcomes.

priya sundram  

Yeah, so we’d collated all this research, but it was all quite fragmentary. We had also been spending time with this elders’ group at the Tamil temple, who met every Tuesday. So, we just go and have a cup of tea and talk with them, and this culminated (at the end of the residency) with Roisin Inglesby, curator at the gallery, doing a tour for the elders, drawing out some of the South Asian connections that we had uncovered, and one of the members of the group was live broadcasting it in Tamil. So, it was really great, this cheerful, loud, colourful group of Tamil elders. It disrupted the space. Some of the younger members of the Tamil community drew Kolams — rice flour-hand drawings — outside the gallery, and also lit some lamps. It felt symbolic of these two worlds coming together, and hopefully that relationship will continue some way beyond the project. That was one of the outcomes to the residency; we also wanted to document some of the South Asian references we found, and to make them accessible, so, we produced an alternative South Asian guide to the collection, and we asked members of the community to contribute.

rachel emily taylor  

The sound of the project and the live event — bringing the community into the space — is really important. Heritage is our connection with the past, but it’s very much in the present. Your residency enabled people to craft new heritage, or find their own heritage, in connection to the gallery.

priya sundram  

I think that’s exactly it: we wanted to offer another way into the collection that drew from a different heritage, but also looking at that shared history. It worked well, in that we had a number of voices from those with South Asian connections and who reflected on really relevant pieces from the per-

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manent collection. Some of the reflections in the guide are more academic and others more emotional — we were lucky to have people who so generously and eloquently contributed to the publication, which is still available at the gallery. nia thandapani  

I think my favourite reflections in the guide are those that are not just about the William Morris Gallery, but those that, somehow, explore the idea of what a museum is for, or who a museum is for. These are honest, immediate responses to the collection, which say, ‘this reminds me of this’. To me, this is an important part of making museums accessible and relevant; people are allowed to come to the collections and respond to them on their own terms.

Studio Carrom used their practice to draw attention to an overlooked narrative — Morris’ links with South Asia – which started when they discovered a scrap of fabric in a drawer in the museum collection. This is an act that could be viewed as an ‘archival impulse’. Their practice disrupted the space, allowing for another voice to be heard, rather than that of Authorised Heritage Discourse (see Figure 3.19). The work was undoubtedly supported by Studio Carrom’s own relationship to South Asia, which might have aided them in building their relationship and trust with the local Tamil community.

Figure 3.20. Studio Carrom, Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia, 2021. Photographed by Felicity Crawshaw. Illustration and Historical Collections

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Figure 3.21. Studio Carrom, Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia, 2021.

Studio Carrom’s residency allowed for the museum to engage with the community, becoming a more inclusive and welcoming space. This is often a key driving force behind museums working with creative practitioners, as Niki Black and Rebecca Farley write in the book Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces, ‘Contemporary commissions aim to extend and deepen audience engagement with heritage sites and their histories’,48 and this is linked to the shift from museums being ‘object-based to being audience focused’.49 This, in turn, is tied to our changing understanding of heritage, as one that is both tangible (objects, landscapes) and intangible (stories, rituals). The William Morris Gallery is the same site to which Claire Robins responded in An Elite Experience for Everyone, which allows for a comparison of approaches. Although Robins’ performative museum tour was influenced by requirements from a university (as part of her PhD study), which was not the case for Studio Carrom, both works aim to provide an alternative voice to the museum. The guide produced by Studio Carrom has longevity and is still present in the museum. In contrast, Robins’ performative tour cannot be recreated and redistributed in the same manner, although An Elite Experience for Everyone was filmed, and was then played as a DVD in the foyer of the gallery,50 visitors engaged with the film differently.51 The context of the two works were different, Robins’ performance was part of her PhD research, with the requirements and expectations in place from a university, and Studio Carrom’s work was undertaken as part of a residency organised by the gallery. The residency would have been driven by particular institutional aims, such as the 2009 council plans for 126

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redevelopment to make the William Morris Gallery ‘more accessible’ and to ‘attract a more diverse audience’.52 In this chapter, we have seen that working with historical collections in museums and archives poses a number of challenges to the illustrator, such as how their bias and positionality can shape their creative response, but there are benefits that this relationship can bring the institution, such as reaching new audiences. When researching for this book, I met with practitioner Isabel Greenberg, who has worked with a number of heritage sites, and this interview allowed me to reflect on other spaces in museums that illustrators can engage with. Spaces that are often overlooked.

Figure 3.22. Studio Carrom, Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia, 2021. Photographed by Felicity Crawshaw.

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Practitioner Interview: Isabel Greenberg isabel greenberg  

I get really excited if I see my book stocked in a museum gift shop or a local heritage site. It’s another way to engage with an audience and get people to see your work who might not ordinarily have seen it. You know, if you don’t go into the graphic novel section of a bookshop, but you are a fan of historical witchcraft, or King Arthur, or the Brontës — I like the idea of people who are interested in the subject matter accessing the work, not just those who are just interested in illustration or who are fans of graphic novels.

rachel emily taylor  

Beyond the work being in the museum shop — a reader might be compelled to go somewhere they wouldn’t have gone if they haven’t happened upon your work. Glass Town might encourage someone to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, for example.

isabel greenberg  

Yes, as someone who works in graphic novels, it’s quite exciting to make narrative or storytelling work in response to something, and that might be situated in a museum gallery or on a wall, rather than in a book. All my work is always telling a story or conveying a message. I’m not the kind of illustrator who’s interested in making work solely to be seen in a gallery setting, but it’s a treat to be able to present ideas in that way occasionally. It’s a different way of working. For example, for the Brontë Parsonage Museum, I made this large, quilted banner — Queen Augusta’s war banner — and that’s not something that could go into my graphic novel, but it’s just like another way of making work. I am able to work across a different medium, but it is still in response to a place or a story.

rachel emily taylor  Really? isabel greenberg  Always.

Alongside the formal gallery space in the museum, there are other spaces within which an illustrator may position themself, such as in the museum shop, foyer, or reception. For the Engine House Residency at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, Copsey and Crewe set up a shop for their fictitious company ‘Copsey and Crew'TM Narrative Excavation Services for Hire’, which included branded pencils, erasers, and badges. Are there unexpected spaces in museums that illustrators can use to explore heritage interventions — like a museum gift shop?

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1. Salwa Nashashibi, ‘Visitor Voices in Art Museums: The Visitor-Written Label’, p.21. 2. Claire Robins, Curious Lessons in the Museum: The Pedagogic Potential of Artists' Interventions (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), p.5. 3. Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p.25. 4. Susan Hiller, After the Freud Museum (London: Book Works, 1995). 5. Zoe Pilger, ‘Indigenous Australia at the British Museum: It’s time to give the Aboriginal Art back’, Independent, 20 April 2015 [accessed 20 May 2017]. 6. The British Museum, Collecting and Empire Trail (2020) [accessed 20 December 2022]. 7. The British Museum Act 1963 forbids the museum from disposing of its collection, unless under exceptional circumstances. Although these laws are being discussed and might be amended in the years following the publication of this book. In comparison, other UK-based museums have more control over their collections, for example, the Horniman Museum [London] returned ownsership of its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in 2022. 8. Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), p.4. 9. Hicks, The Brutish Museums, p.6. 10. Hicks, The Brutish Museums, p.9. 11. Hans Haacke cited in Alexander Alberro, ‘Institutions, critique, and institutional critique’ in eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Institutional Critique: an Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 12. Fred Wilson, ‘A Change of Heart – Fred Wilson’s Impact on Museums’, The Margins to the Core? [Sackler Conference for Arts Education, 2010] [accessed 1 February 2023]. 13. An example is the V&A Museum, London, which contains a number of archives, such as the V&A Theatre & Performance Archive. 14. Examples are the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Archives, UK. 15. Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York, NY: Atropos Press, 2009). 16. Charles Merewether et al., The Archive: (Documents of Contemporary Art Series) (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006) 17. Hal Foster, ‘the Archival Impulse’ October, 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp.3–24, p.4. 18. Hiller, After the Freud Museum, p.45. 19. Mark Godfrey, ‘Artist as Historian’, October, 120 (Spring, 2007), pp.140–72, p.143 20. Fiorella Foscarini et al., Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories (London: Facet Publishing, 2016), p.214. 21. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Archives, Documents, Traces’, in Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006), p. 66. [Temps et Récit III, Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1985.] 22. Ricoeur, Archives, Documents, Traces, p.66.

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23. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.57. [Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995]. 24. Derrida, Archive Fever, p.57. 25. Sigmund Freud cited by John Forrester ‘Mille e tre: Freud and Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elisner and Roger Cardinel (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), p.227. 26. Leah Fusco, Illustrating Northeye: An Exploration of Time, Matter, and Movement at a Historic Wetland Site (doctoral thesis, Kingston University, 2021). 27. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 28. Covert research is often equated with deception and transgression, as participants are often unaware or deliberately misinformed about the study. 29. Nick Cass et al., Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2022). 30. Nick Cass, Contemporary Art and Heritage: Interventions at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2015). 31. Cass, Contemporary Art and Heritage, p.294. 32. Little Frank and His Carp is a single channel video of Andrea Fraser, who walks around the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao listening to the official audio guide. It appears to be shot on a hidden camera. In one instance, Fraser is instructed to touch a limestone-clad pillar, she lifts up her short green dress to sexually rub against it, revealing white underwear. The sexual aspects of the performance may be seen as a reaction to the language used in the audio guide. 33. Catherine Anyango Grünewald has recently worked with: the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm; the Maritime Museum in Sweden; the Angola Museum in Louisiana, USA; The Mary Base Turner Project [data base of lynchings]; and the New York Times article archive. 34. Catherine Anyango Grünewald responds to literature. See: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Edinburgh: Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899); Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate (New York: Vintage, 1993). Scandorama was written by Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo and illustrated by Anyango Grünewald. 35. Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate (New York: Vintage, 1993). For Dead Man Walking (2022), Catherine Anyango Grünewald worked with the Sr. Helen Prejean papers in the DePaul University Library, Chicago. 36. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, ‘Re-Collecting Memories’, OEI #8889 (2020). 37. John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), p.44. 38. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archeology (London: Routledge, 2001), pp.52–53. 39. Rodney Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, p.35. 40. The Historical Research with the Centre for Metropolitan history’s Stray Voices project aimed to bring to light stories of homeless people. 41. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on "Camp"’, Partisan Review, 31, 4 (1964), pp.515–530. 42. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 43. Sarfraz Manzoor et al ‘How do we stop publishing being so posh and white?’, Guardian, 11 December 2015,   [accessed 15 January 2023]. 130

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44. Tyler Mitchell, I Can Make You Feel Good (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 2020). 45. An ‘inside researcher’ refers to when a researcher conducts research with communities that they are members of. It is a term used in academia, with practitioners being aware of their inside–outside position in qualitative research. 46. Waltham Forest, Statistics about the Borough [accessed 12 November 2022]. 47. Sri Karpaga Vinayagar Kovil Temple, Walthamstow, London UK. 48. Niki Black and Rebecca Farley, ‘Mapping contemporary art in the heritage experience’, Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), p.15. 49. Nick Cass, Gill Park, and Anna Powell, ‘Introduction’, in Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), p.3. 50. Claire Robins, Curious Lessons in the Museum, p.145. 51. Claire Robins writes, ‘The film was too long and […] for a casual viewer, catching only a minute or so of Victoria’s oration might be confusing. This was certainly the case for one visitor who responded angrily by demanding of the staff: “Who does she bloody well think she is?!”’ in Curious Lessons in the Museum, p.145. 52. Robins, Curious Lessons in the Museum, p.121.

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Chapter 4 Illustration and Historical Landscapes We are surrounded by the memories of the people that came before us, their possessions, and their impact on the land. Landscapes can be symbolic: they play a role in our cultural and social beliefs, our national identity, and our acts of remembrance. Heritage is tied to the idea of a sense of place, not simply in identity construction, but in the positioning of cultures and our processes of making sense of the world. Heritage is not always contained within a managed space, like a museum or archive, and it can occur in urban areas and natural landscapes. Building on the previous chapter, which explored the role of the illustrator in relation to museums and archives, this chapter investigates how illustrators might engage with heritage that is uncontained, in a landscape1 or at a site.2 Heritage practitioners have divided landscapes into ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. Natural landscapes refer to geological and physical formations, whereas cultural landscapes refer to a place that has been shaped by human practices. I would argue that no landscape can be described by the binary separation of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’.3 Nevertheless, these terms underpin important policies, debates in heritage management, and they have an impact on the definition of a ‘heritage place’.4 UNESCO lists cultural landscapes as having World Heritage status, and yet, there is ‘a sense that nature is superior to culture’ in the policy documents and an ‘implication that “nature is perfect and culture is a nuisance”’.5 The artificial naming of landscapes as natural and/or cultural has been challenged,6 Laurajane Smith writes: Not only are landscapes inevitably physically shaped or altered by human cultural practices — and in that sense ‘cultural’, but they are also ‘cultural’ in the sense that the way they are conceived and understood dictates how they are managed and used.7

It is a political act to name and classify these spaces. When sites are deemed ‘vulnerable’ and protected, other parts of the landscape are transformed into ‘wilderness’8 — but this change is discursive. The heritage industry itself is shaping natural landscapes through the practices of management and preservation. We must also accept the multi-vocality of place, where there is a plurality of meaning and interpretation occurring as a consequence of human interrelations.

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A landscape is a palimpsest 9 of multiple times. Landscapes are continually written over by our interactions10 with them. These places can be described as ‘collages of intersecting and overlapping meaningful experiences’,11 but also as spaces where meanings and memories are contested, performed, and negotiated. A landscape ‘tells – or rather is – a story [that] enfolds the lives and times of predecessors’.12 It could be argued that these places only become places of heritage when acts of remembrance occur at them. If we recall the hazelnut foundling token, would it be heritage without the meaning-making, and the museum cabinet that surrounds it? (See page 10-11). When a ruin exists in a landscape and is labelled heritage, it is transformed, and heritage practitioners might then ‘build “around”, “within”, “above” or “below” [or] “with”’ 13 the site, and something new will be assembled. It is these interactions between people and the environment, and the changes that take place through this relationship, which are part of the heritage process. Historical sites are theatres of remembrance14 and heritage is a ‘multilayered performance’15 that happens at a site – and that performance can be an embodied act of remembering, commemoration, or a performance of visiting, preservation, and management.16 Past human experience can be remembered by our interactions with physical places, and these experiences may help to bind communities. Laurajane Smith uses Stonehenge as an example of this, and this may be provactive; her position is that it is ‘a collection of rocks in a field’ but what makes them heritage is the activities that have happened, and continue to happen, around them,which they have become a part of.17 Smith writes that without the knowledge or awareness of the cultural processes that occur at the site, then the place is not ‘inherently valuable, nor does [it] carry a freight of innate meaning’.18 The illustrator’s engagement with a place is part of the heritage process, as they use their practice to create meaning, and this can include activities occurring at a site. There is value in all kinds of landscapes, not just the ones that have been selected by experts. Landscapes shift and change. Landscapes can be transient. We witness the impact of environmental change, such as flooding, coastal change, fire, ruination, and invasions. They don’t remain the same. In Curated Decay, 19 Caitlin Desilvey writes on the care of vulnerable sites in terms of ‘entropy’, and about how we must collaborate with, rather than defend against, the natural process of decay. Illustrators have engaged with all kinds of heritage landscapes, from marshlands to building sites. There are questions worth considering for the illustrator engaging with this form of practice: how can illustration be used to document changes occurring at heritage sites? What methods can we use to engage with place? What purpose does illustrative practice have when working with landscapes that are tied to historical narratives?

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Field Work Walking can be used as a tool to observe and interact with the environment.20 Writers, particularly, have often used walking to engage with a place. It can be thought of as a performative action that is used as a method to attune to the landscape. Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains in The Living Mountain,21 as does Robert Macfarlane in his book The Old Ways. 22 There are sensory methods used to experience a site, such as listening, smelling and touching, all of which can be integrated into the illustrator’s practice. Shepherd returned to re-experience the same place, over and over again. There can also be advantages to remaining in one place within the landscape for some time, as you can become more aware of subtle changes. When engaging with a site, archaeologists work at ground level, encountering place through seeking, identifying, finding, enquiring, discovering, observing, speculating.23 Illustrators can work in the same manner, undertaking field work at a site as a form of research and collecting raw data in the natural environment. Anthropologists have used field work to study other cultures, and they use field notes as a key part of the process. When working at a site, there is always an inevitable ‘insider and outsider’ dynamic: are you embedded locally as a resident (an insider) or are you a visiting researcher (an outsider)? How might that relationship change your resulting work? Anthropologist Michael Taussig discusses drawings in field notebooks as ‘fragments suggestive of a world beyond’ 24 that, unlike photographs, give a ‘squint-eyed view’25 of what they attempt to depict. For anthropologists, these drawings are thought of as ‘mere aids’ 26 and are frequently omitted from the final publication. But, for the illustrator, drawing at the site can be a key method of engagement. Unlike photography, which stops time, field note drawings can ‘encompass’ time, as Taussig writes, it is a ‘two-way movement’.27 Taussig refers to John Berger when examining the process of looking that is used when drawing; a line drawn brings you ‘closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you become’.28 A drawing, then, becomes a form of ‘sympathetic magic’29 – a type of magic based on imitation and contact30 – in which the drawing allows for an embodied understanding of the subject through the physical act of making the image. The ability a drawing has – to ‘encompass’ time – can be compared to the occurrence of intangible heritage at a tangible site: ‘[Building] “around”, “within”, “above” or “below” [or] “with.”’31 Perhaps, encompass is the word we could use when trying to articulate this relationship. It is a surrounding. Archaeologist Helen Wickstead writes about how the ‘gestural mark or trace of drawing [can] be related to archaeological traces’, and how drawing’s ‘ability to “write time” can be used to engage with archaeological concepts of time’.32 Archaeology often figures the invisible as the ‘not yet Illustration and Historical Landscapes

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visible’ and ‘actively generates absences at the same time as it makes things present, partly through drawing – an art of traces constituted by, and proliferating, absence’.33 Wickstead concludes that both drawing and archaeology are comparable, in that they are traces of ‘action, presence and absence’,34 and this could also be applied to illustration. Responding to a site could be a form of reportage illustration, which, in the UK, is defined by what we can see and is comparable to photojournalism.35 For this practice, illustrators work in-situ, and there is a ‘sense of being “in the moment”’. 36 Illustrators have engaged with place through drawing on location. Jon Halls is an illustrator who focuses on London’s ‘Green Belt’, drawing landscapes with pen and ink on location, which are then developed from photographs that he takes during these visits. Liam O’Connor undertook a residency at the British Museum (2010–14), where he drew the changing building and the construction of the World Conservation and Exhibition Centre. Rachel Lillie’s project, The In-Between: An Ode to Epping Forest (2018), was made by drawing on location and was exhibited at Vestry House Museum (London). Illustrators can also respond to a site by making situated illustrative works. This is a form of site-specific practice that is designed for a particular location. The term is used in art practice to describe work that is made for a particular location, but when it is moved from that site, it loses a substantial part of its meaning. Examples were discussed in a previous chapter, such as Mining the Museum (1992–93) (see page 92), Kept Within the Bounds (2016) (see pages 44-45), and Distant Fellowship: Morris and South Asia (2018–19) (see pages 120-127). Illustrator Pat WingShan Wong, an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, engaged with the Billingsgate Fish Market, in Canary Wharf (London, UK) to create a community-led archive, constructed in collaboration with the local fishmongers. The work is rooted in the history of the site. Included in the project was an exhibition at the Billingsgate Fish Market café and a Barter auction — a performative auction and exhibition at Canary Wharf place – but the project also exists independently as an online depository.

Practitioner Interview: Pat WingShan Wong The archive [Barter Archive] is a preservation of collective memory of the Billingsgate community and challenges capitalism, highlighting and questioning how value is assigned through culture and society. I used illustration as a research tool when observing the fish market and it allowed me to open the conversations with the mongers, which enabled me to understand the community. During this research, I found it interesting to see how bargaining

pat wingshan wong  

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Figure 4.1. Pat WingShan Wong, Barter Archive [Barter Outlet Exhibition in Billingsgate Market], 2021.

Figure 4.2. Pat WingShan Wong, Barter Archive [Barter Outlet Exhibition in Billingsgate Market], 2021.

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was an important interaction in the market, and inspired by the idea of exchange, my sketches became an alternative currency in the market.

In her project, Barter Archive, Wong has engaged with (what is arguably) a non-conventional heritage site, rather than a museum and archive. When lecturing at Kingston School of Art (in 2019), I came across another example of illustrators engaging with non-conventional sites. I worked with student Caitlin McLoughlin, whose third-year project was titled The Yellow Wallpaper: An Illustrated Reader (see Figure 4.3). The outcome was a book that grew from her research project on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892),37 which is tied to nineteenth-century treatment for cases of hysteria. In the book, the female character is bound to her bedroom by her physician husband. A significant part of McLoughlin’s research became focused on Victorian-era ‘lunatic asylums’, and she visited locations that were tied to these histories as part of her research. Practitioner Interview: Caitlin McLoughlin caitlin mcloughlin  

I visited sites that were once home to some of these asylums: Wandsworth Asylum (now Springfield University Hospital), Camberwell Asylum (the building of which now belongs to University of the Arts London), and Peckham Asylum (which was totally demolished and on the site now stands the secondary school, Harris Academy Peckham). When I was on site, I photographed the spaces, the buildings, and their surroundings, hoping to get a more embodied sense of the activity that once went on there. At the time, I was reading and researching books such as Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse,38 which is a journalistic account of the ten days she spent at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island, New York, after feigning insanity so that she might be forcibly admitted. Visiting the London sites of where some of these asylums once were allowed me to engage more empathetically with such events that Bly describes, regardless of the accuracy of time or location — knowing that something similar may have happened here  was enough.  I find it strange to look at these photos now, as I remember the day that I took them (I visited all of the sites on the same day). I was trialling a new sleep medication in an attempt at tackling the terrible insomnia I had throughout my second and final year of university. The pill I’d taken the night before had a twenty-four-hour half-life and I woke up as if I was still asleep. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other felt like I was wading through heavy tar. Being in this semi-sedated

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state undoubtedly influenced the way I took the photos and trying to understand the plight of the people imprisoned in these brutal institutions whilst battling my own mental health crisis was, in some ways, a strange and moving experience. [When I visited,] parts of Springfield University Hospital (once Wandsworth Asylum) were abandoned, perhaps awaiting demolition, with boarded-up windows and surrounded by barbedwire fencing. The Yellow Wallpaper is often considered a gothic horror, even a ghost story, and making the connection between the tropes of horror and the abandoned asylum were inevitable. But this connection was also something I was actively looking for, attempting to echo the way the story harnesses these tropes to challenge and subvert ideas of how women were silenced and chastised at the hands of patriarchal medical science. These ideas crept into the way I documented the spaces: I honed in on windows and doors, tall walls and metal gates, and I tried to convey how eerie these spaces felt. The unsettling residue of their former lives became almost tangible when I allowed myself to make these connections. Ultimately, the photos were included in the book alongside captions and footnotes that contextualised them and pulled together the different threads of research, with the story itself contained in the main body of the text. 

Figure 4.3. Caitlin McLoughlin, The Yellow Wallpaper: An Illustrated Reader, 2019.

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This project demonstrates how an illustrator might incorporate a historical site into their work. McLoughlin contextualises the images of asylums with text, comparable to how a museum curator might caption images and artefacts within a museum. By visiting the London sites and including them in her imagery, she created a sense of place, even if it is not historically accurate. Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was semi-autobiographical and was based on her experience of post-partum psychosis, for which she took ‘bed rest’ as prescribed by Dr Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia. Perkins Gilman will not have visited the same sites that McLoughlin referenced. Instead, McLoughlin uses her historical research to link the narrative to a wider experience of women’s treatment for ‘hysteria’ in the 1800s, which can be likened to Perkin Gilman’s experience of ‘bed rest’. The inclusion of the asylums could be described as ‘anchors’ that generate ‘hot’ authenticity and help root the work in the time Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. A similarity could be drawn between this work and English Heritage’s core ‘Vision and Values’ (see pages 22-23) and their aim to ‘separate fact from fiction’.39 English Heritage’s pairing of this statement with a photograph of a historical re-enactment alludes to there being a space between fact and fiction. Illustration can occupy this in-between space and, even if it doesn’t claim to be historically accurate, it can generate emotional experiences in an audience that engage with the narrative. McLoughlin visited the sites in a ‘semi-sedated state’, comparable to the experience of the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper. How might reenactment or performative engagements of place be used as part of the illustrator’s research method? Illustration Practitioner and the Transient Landscape

Illustrator Leah Fusco’s doctoral research, titled Illustrating Northeye: An Exploration of Time, Matter, and Movement at a Historic Wetland Site (2021),40 explored a physically shifting site of a deserted medieval village in East Sussex (UK), previously an island and now a saltmarsh41 (called Northeye). At times of high rainfall, the foundations of the village are filled with water and become visible, but this only occurs for a short period of time. The project examines how drawing, through still and moving images can document ‘alternative time readings of place’.42 In July 2022, I met with Fusco to discuss the project. She spoke of a critical starting point being the contemporary definition of ‘reportage illustration’ from Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello’s book Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism, which is depicting what you witness and bearing testament to a moment in time. Fusco was intrigued by situations and places where this might be impossible to achieve, asking, ‘How do we see? What kinds of technologies are we using to elucidate visual material?’43 and has since moved away from using the term ‘visibility,’ as it is not ‘absolute’.44 An illustrator’s engagement with a historical landscape involves a ‘multi142

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Figure 4.4. Leah Fusco, Drawing Northeye, 2019.

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layered understanding’ of the site.45 During my conversation with Fusco, she discussed this, and how it might not necessarily be a chronological experience, referencing Doreen Massey, who depicts this idea when she uses Raymond Williams’ 46 metaphor of a train: You’re taking a train across the landscape – you’re not travelling across a dead flat surface that is space: you’re cutting across a myriad of stories going on. So instead of space being this flat surface it’s like a pincushion of a million stories: if you stop at any point in that walk there will be a house with a story.47

There could be past, present, and future stories occurring at once, and, for the illustrator, there could be ‘multiple stories to tell’.48

Figure 4.5. Leah Fusco, Spongecam, 2019. Photographed by Daryl Holter.

Practitioner Interview: Leah Fusco leah fusco  

Ways of navigating the, sometimes unpassable, conditions of the marshes have been developed without the use of permanent infrastructure. In early spring, before the cows are put out to pasture, a sheep farmer renting the land uses a quad bike to cover the area quickly during lambing season. Scores of lines appear over the course of a few days. I think back to the lines that would have been cut by ploughs, historically pulled by oxen, and later the commercial turfing machinery. The landowner of Northeye is a cattle farmer and has two hundred and fifty cows, spending four mornings a week counting his animals on a round

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trip across Hooe and Pevensey [two small villages in East Sussex]. I get in contact via the local working men’s club and am invited to join him one morning. I arrive at 6 am and park at the farm. He decides on using the tractor as the cows need feeding, so I climb in and perch on the narrow passenger seat, with a jack russell on my lap. It’s very cold, but sunny, and as we make our way towards Northeye through the lanes of Hooe, low-lying mist sits in the landscape. By the time we reach Chapel Field, the mist has gone, but frost is still clinging to the grass on the shady sides of the earthworks, giving them more definition than usual. The landowner asks me if I would like to drive the tractor, or to feed the cows, so I stand on the back of the trailer, attempting to tear large clumps from the hay bales to throw on the grass below. Once the hay is gone (it takes a long time), I am asked if I would like to drive the tractor and count the herd, so we swap seats and I put it in low gear, creeping slowly over the land. We drive to the right side of the cows and I am given tips on how to count them – the trick is to stay parallel, not to go too far ahead and lose track. The first time I count forty-three. He shakes his head and tells me to try again. I go more slowly this time. By the end I have counted forty-eight, the correct number. We stop to walk amongst the animals and get a closer look, checking for any signs of illness. A small notebook is pulled from the landowner’s pocket, filled with lines of data recordings — he calls it his ‘office’ — tracking the cycle of each animal from birth to death. It’s a simple but rigorous system, relying on the old practice of ‘lookering’, where a farmer or shepherd follows old paths across the landscape to count and monitor livestock.49

Figure 4.6. Leah Fusco, Lookering [film still], 2017.

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Figure 4.7. Leah Fusco, Earthworks I, 2015.

Figure 4.8. Leah Fusco, Earthworks II, 2015.

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Fusco uses ‘re-enactment’ to immerse herself into the landscape, and this might entail carrying out industrial or agricultural activities, such as ‘lookering’, or making vials of medieval ink, which formed the materials for her image making. She engaged with playful methods to explore to the site, such as using a dinghy to travel the waterways and alter her viewpoint, which could be thought of as a ‘performance’50 at the site, allowing Fusco to shift her perspective, both visually and temporally, and, arguably, to view Northeye as it might have appeared thousands of years prior, when it was mostly submerged. This leads me to question the multiple ways that an illustrator can view and engage with a space, and comparisons could be drawn to McLoughlin’s site visits to the London asylums in a ‘semi-sedated state’. On the Illustration undergraduate degree at Camberwell College of Arts, illustrator and Year 3 Leader, 51 Jen Franklin, has developed a form of practice she calls ‘method illustration’ (a play on the term ‘method acting’52). It can be compared to Fusco and McLoughlin’s working processes of engaging with a site. In the students’ final year, Franklin has integrated method illustration into the curriculum and encourages students to adopt this practice to support thinking through making. As a process, it ‘requires a student to embody, become, make, or engage experientially with the topic they are researching’. 53 I would encourage illustration practitioners to adopt this as part of their method, particularly when responding to sites and locations.

Figure 4.9. Leah Fusco, Bexhill Museum, 2019.

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One of Fusco’s final outcomes for Illustrating Northeye was an exhibition at Bexhill Museum, which included a single screen documentary film, with a script developed from personal experience, collected accounts, archival records, and historic material – multiple voices synthesised into a work (see figure 4.9). What strikes me is the numerous parts that have been brought together to tell a unified story of Northeye. Fusco has a personal experience of the site, and, through the project, became a patron of the museum. This relationship could be considered alongside Amy Goodwin’s work with the National Fairground and Circus Archive (see pages 114-119) – could Fusco also be an ‘inside researcher’? This knowledge would allow for an understanding of a subject that is, arguably, deeper than that of a handful of visits. Even so, when responding to a historical site, Fusco says that it might not always be the illustrator’s ‘story to tell’.54 As a method to overcome this, Fusco uses interviews and workshops to explore the responses of others to Northeye. These outcomes enable Fusco to curate different elements to see what narratives emerge from these fragments, rather than relying purely on her own, singular interpretation. This could be comparable to Geoff Coupland’s A Mythic Understanding, which allowed for an audience to interoperate their own narrative from a group exhibition of separate works responding to the life of David Jones (see pages 71-73). Illustration Practitioner and the Virtual Landscape

Fieldwork can be undertaken from a distance. In 2020, I worked alongside Fusco to establish the research platform Remote Sensing. Our aim was that it would be a place to share knowledge, approaches, and challenges in fieldwork, with a focus on places, communities, and collections. Although it was established during the COVID-19 pandemic, it continues to examine digital approaches to fieldwork and how sites can be engaged with from a distance. At the 2021 symposium, illustrators presented projects that evidenced how this might be approached, such as Serena Katt’s project Traces (2020), exploring Kenya through Google Street View, and Matthew Flintham’s Critical Airspace (2019–20), working with Google Earth and Google Earth Studio to reimagine airspace structures as ‘non-spaces’. With his illustration practice, Gareth Proskourine-Barnett responds to cultural landscapes and the ruins of Brutalist architecture. For his PhD project, titled Brutalist Architecture on the Internet: Future Territories/Echoes from the Ruins,55 he looks to cyberspace to provide a territory in which to investigate Brutalist architecture.

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Figure 4.10. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, An Alternative Archive of Brutalist Architecture, 2008-18.

Figure 4.11. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, An Alternative Archive of Brutalist Architecture, 2008-18.

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Figure 4.12. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, An Alternative Archive of Brutalist Architecture, 2008-18.

Figure 4.13. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, An Alternative Archive of Brutalist Architecture, 2008-18.

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Practitioner Interview: Gareth Proskourine-Barnett rachel emily taylor  

Illustrators can use their practice to understand, document, and examine a historical site. Your current research explores how web-based platforms can help us to reimagine our relationships to sites that have been lost or forgotten. In your work, there is a particular focus on the Birmingham Central Library. I was interested in what led you to explore a physical space and take it into a virtual one?

gareth proskourine - barnett  

There’s a couple of different things here. On one level, I’m working with how we engage and experience city spaces, which is already mediated through our screens via technology. There are the digital infrastructures that govern and direct so many of our interactions within urban spaces; the separation between a physical and virtual space feels like slippery territory. They are increasingly crossing into and onto one another. So, on a surface level, there’s that. But there is also the history of Brutalism, which is really interesting, especially in terms of its relationship to technology. Concrete has this dualism of being something that was technologically progressive, and yet also, the buildings seemed to hark back to ancient temples, and have the feel of sublime ruins. And then, at the same time, in Brutalist architecture, especially in the architecture of post war in Britain, concrete was seen as a progressive material that was very forward thinking. Brutalism represented a genuine attempt to rethink the way that we organise space, construct society, and dismantle hierarchies, whether that’s through the actual design of the buildings and the removal of ornament, The Balfron Tower [in London] is a good example of this. So, it’s been in the press recently because of its going through a big refurbishment. Over a period of time, the social tenants were removed, and then — for a brief period — they were replaced with artists. And now, the flats have gone through a designer makeover, and are being sold for a lot of money, and no one that was originally living in the block is able to return.56 The lift shaft is separate to the main bit of Balfron Tower, so you’ve got the service tower and a series of bridges that go across and join up with the main block on every third floor, giving you ‘streets in the sky’. The boiler services were situated on the top of the service tower, and it was a real moment of celebration. Especially when you consider the slums that they replaced. It’s like, ‘yes, we can have central heating’, and these buildings were really proud of their kind of technological prowIllustration and Historical Landscapes

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ess, of being able to heat an entire tower block. And it’s also like, ‘yes, our boiler is on top of our building’. It’s like a crown. This technological aspect has always been, in some way, kind of tied into Brutalism, and into concrete. If we recall the history of the internet, in 1990, you’ve got Tim Berners Lee’s version of something like what we now know of as the internet. But you can go back to the ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which was from the late 1960s, funded by the US Defence department [ARPA], and developed at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University in the US, and you have the beginnings of a network-based communication system. So, just like how the use of concrete developed during the Second World War with bunker architecture, the beginnings of the internet were developed during the Cold War – they are both materials or products of war. We might now see them both as ruins, like the internet is not the utopian space that – at one point – people thought it would be. John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace, which says: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.57 It’s the opening line of his manifesto for what he thought the internet would be, or should be. So, there are all of these different threads, which are entangled, and Brutalism was always this thing that seemed kind of caught between the past and the future. It was built for a future world, but it almost feels like a kind of relic from a future world. It feels like something that was almost always out of place. There’s a weirdness to it. It never really belonged and then it became tied into narratives of the Soviet Communism, probably because it was imagining a world without hierarchies. These buildings are caught in this moment, where they were never allowed to become the version of themselves that they meant to be. rachel emily taylor  

The Brutalist buildings that you’re working with … do they no longer exist?

gareth proskourine - barnett  

When I started the project, the initial idea was just to look at Brutalist architecture through the internet and think of this as a site for an archaeological excavation; not just to think about the past, but as a way of speculating

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on the future. I’m taking these two ruins – the ruin of the internet and the ruin of Brutalism – and using them both as a lens to think about a kind of rebirth or reimagining of the future.

Figure 4.14. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, On The Subject of Precarity, 2019. [Grand Union, Birmingham].

I started by doing a series of Google Street View walks and going to every Brutalist building. I had this list, and it wasn’t even a definitive list of Brutalism, because that can be tricky. How do we define what is Brutalist? Is it the materials, a particular period, certain architects? There ends up being lots of confusion over what is and isn’t [Brutalist], and then, sometimes, you had cheaper imitations being made because they were fashionable, which now we might just say are bad buildings, but they are branded as Brutalist because it helps for this narrative of Brutalism being ‘bad’. I was just going through blogs and social media, looking at comments threads, looking at hashtags and any building that had #Brutalism attached it, seeing whether it kind of fitted within the pure architectural theorist definition of Brutalism or not. I was interested in how the hashtags had become a way to mark buildings and mark spaces, and I began to think of the way classification works.

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If someone posted a picture of a building on Instagram, someone else might write a comment underneath with the #brutalism. It might not even be that the person who originally took or shared the picture decided that they thought, ‘It’s Brutalist’, but somebody within this networked system has attributed the building in that way. There are these hierarchies of classification. Who gets to decide what, in regard to our histories or the kind of stories that come from those classifications? I’m trying to look for ways of destabilising or reversing this in various ways. In one instance, I was looking for a building that had disappeared: Leeds International Swimming Pool. I’d gone to this location on Google Street View, and I was thinking that the building was still there. I turned up at the location, on my laptop, and it was just a car park. As I shifted the cursor, I was ‘walking’ around, being like, ‘Oh, right, OK. I thought it was here’, then, all of a sudden, I shifted backwards, and the building appeared. At that moment, there was a re-emerging of the building as a ghost. The site came back to life. Then, of course, I started to realise that, actually, you can time hop in Google Street View, which made looking for buildings that had been demolished easier — as long as they existed in 2008 or 2009, when Google Street View began. rachel emily taylor  

So, in terms of your research methods, you visit the site, both physically and virtually. You explore the place in the present [standing in the car park, looking for Leeds International Swimming Pool] and the past [Google Street View image of Leeds International Swimming Pool] at the same time?

gareth proskourine-barnett 

Yes, definitely. I guess we are always connected to or part of different networks, so that tension between the physical and virtual and how they map onto one another is always interesting. One of the things I did quite early on with the Birmingham Central Library was to have a tour of the demolition site by the contractors. Obviously, I couldn’t go into the actual demolition zone, but they were able to give me five sacks of concrete rubble left from the building, which I later 3D-scanned and have been working with ever since. Even when I’m working with the digital version, I tend to have the physical version out on my desk. I’m really interested in the movement between physical and digital artefacts, and my own movement or dislocation, really.

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rachel emily taylor  

What kind of questions were you exploring through this form of illustrative making?

gareth proskourine - barnett  

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been calling a ‘forensic fictioning’ — as a kind of speculative documentary form of practice, to expand on the spatial narratives that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, or the narratives that we construct around specific sites or places. Also, how the process of moving from physical to digital, back-and-forth, creates new spaces. What fictions or histories might emerge in these spaces and what are the ways that we can reveal a kind of multi-layered history? What’s visible and what is unseen? And the tension between these two. The making processes are a kind of amateur excavation, and the slippages and transitions of material or matter as it becomes more fluid — as it moves between online and offline modes — how can I shape it and mould it, to speculate on alternative futures?

rachel emily taylor  

You have been writing on hauntology, and these questions link to those ideas. How have you been exploring this through illustration practice and writing?

gareth proskourine - barnett  

There is an established relationship between writing or text and images; and the normal trajectory of that relationship for illustrators is that there is text and then the images come out of that. I’ve been thinking about how you might, I suppose, start to reverse engineer that relationship. What happens when we start with images, but then think about how I might write text to these images, about these images, as an illustrator? I see that as part of an illustration practice. Importantly, I see that as kind of key. This is me, writing, but I am also illustrating. Words construct images. Illustration could be considered as writing because there is a narrative, and you are constructing images through someone’s imagination while they’re reading.

rachel emily taylor  

gareth proskourine - barnett  

Yes. It creates a space where I can be more explicit with some of these more multi-layered narratives and hauntings of future worlds. That is the beautiful thing about words; they are a visual language, in a way. They are things that create images. When we read a book, we create images of it in our head. As well as writing, I’ve been using the ‘performed lecture’ as a space to explore this relationship between words and images, and storytelling and history, enacting complex histories through objects as vessels. The idea of perIllustration and Historical Landscapes

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formance and illustration is also really interesting to me; how we perform different roles through different lenses, but all as an illustrator. Illustration happens in the doing, in the space where images are formed and produced.

The conversation with Proskourine-Barnett raises questions about classification. In heritage practice, this is undertaken by ‘experts’ and is part of Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (see pages 21-22), but online platforms disrupt this. For example, on Instagram, a hashtag can be contributed by anyone – and it can be factually incorrect. This brings me back to the conversation with Nick Cass (see pages 96-99), who says, ‘In trying to unpack the idea of an encounter in a heritage space, there is a question of who are the agents in that conversation?’ Although this was related to museums, it can also be applied to virtual spaces. Cass also describes the power of language in heritage spaces, and the power of classification, and how this can create division. There is potential for illustration to be a ‘destabilising or reversing’58 factor in heritage ‘terminology, communication, and language’.59 Proskourine-Barnett’s engagement with Brutalist architecture is not only directed at the past, but also rooted in the present and looking towards a future – and alternative futures that may never come to pass. The virtual world becomes a place where the Brutalist buildings can be ‘a version of themselves which they’re meant to be’. There is a sense of nostalgia in this search for ‘lost’ futures, which Mark Fisher writes about in Ghosts of My Life (2014)60 and applies Derrida’s concept of hauntology (see page 40) to music and film culture. As a method, Proskourine-Barnett moves his works back-and-forth through the physical and virtual spaces, exploring what can emerge from this transformative process, and examining how material can embody histories.

Figure 4.15. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, Common Ground Residency, 2019. [The New Art Gallery, Walsall] 156

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Both Fusco and Proskourine-Barnett discuss ‘visibility’ in relation to their work. Fusco describes how she has moved away from using the term as it is ‘not absolute’, and Proskourine-Barnett notes that there is a ‘tension’ between ‘what’s visible and what is unseen’. Illustration can be applied to spaces where history might not be ‘seen’, and this is a common thread throughout the conversations in this book. Although ‘visibility’ can be dependent on multiple factors, including culture and expertise, it could become exclusionary. Illustration is tied to ideas of visibility through ideas of ‘illumination’, which is to ‘make visible’, but also to ideas of ‘encircling and traversing’.61 Perhaps we can think of more nuanced terms of ‘visibility’ when the practice is applied to heritage? In December 2022, I presented a paper at the illustration symposium Colouring In: The Past (see pages 30-31). For the presentation, I critically explored the notion of ‘colouring in the past’, and what it might mean. Although the title of the project is a playful take on illustration practice being derogatively thought of as one that ‘colours in’ with its limited critical discourse,62 metaphorically, these empty spaces of knowledge need to be filled. When the phrase colouring in is positioned alongside the past, it may suggest that illustration practice can fill in spaces with the aim to ‘make [history] visible’ – and this is how I initially interpreted it, even though it might not be how it was intended. The title allowed me to reflect on what problems might occur for illustrators responding to the past, for example, when referencing ‘colour’ in this context, it can allude to race, and it might not be ‘the illustrator’s story to tell’.63 Instead, I suggest we can consider illustration as an act of outlining the past, which is tied to the root of the word illustration as ‘encircling and traversing’64 and Taussig’s writing on drawings in field notes as ‘encompassing’ time.65 When using language to describe illustration practice and heritage-making, do we ‘make visible’ or do we ‘give voice’? Both terms have been used in this book, and I will hesitate before saying that one is correct and the other is not, as it is dependent on the practitioner. As mentioned in Chapter 2, I prefer the term ‘to give voice’ when referring to my own practice (see pages 39). Even so, by choosing one phrase, is that as binary as the artificial separation of ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ landscapes? I hope that this book invites a discussion and that both can be used to question the function of illustration in heritage.

Future Sites of Practice As the relationship between illustration and heritage develops, it is interesting to consider the various sites and landscapes where projects can occur. Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration [formerly called House of Illustration] will be opening its new site at the New River Head in 2024, which will come after the publication of this book. The New River Head is an industrial heritage site that supplied clean drinking water to people in LonIllustration and Historical Landscapes

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don. Construction of the New River began in the early 1600s and, as demand expanded in the 1700s, water was pumped via a windmill, the base of which is still at the site – and is where Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe’s New River Folk (2022) was exhibited (see pages 65-70). The Artistic Director, Olivia Ahmad, is overseeing the process of establishing Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration at the new site. The project will enable and support further projects that explore the relationship between heritage and illustration, developing an approach to the interpretation that will help engage audiences and the local community.

Practitioner Interview: Olivia Ahmad rachel emily taylor  

Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration has purchased New River Head, which is an industrial heritage site (and a ruin). What was the motivation behind acquiring and restoring this site?

olivia ahmad  

The Centre was founded as a charity in 2002 (then called House of Illustration) by illustrator Quentin Blake and a group of friends. In a way, it was a grass-roots organisation: illustrators came together to address the absence of their practice in the public arts landscape themselves. There were museums, public art galleries, and funded education programmes supporting painting, sculpture, film, craft, and design, but the same couldn’t be said for illustration, at least not in the UK. The group set about creating this space, spending years building advocacy and raising funds for their idea. Gradually, the charity built a staff team and, in 2014, its first space — House of Illustration — opened in King’s Cross. It had a studio that housed an active education programme, small museum-standard galleries hosting changing exhibitions, and a residency and commissioning programme inviting illustrators to develop new work. That space was only ever temporary: it was rented on a relatively short-term tenancy, and the financial burden of rent payments made the situation unsustainable. It was an amazing space to pilot and test our work, but it was small and was soon outgrown. For a number of years, we looked for a building where our work could be housed permanently. In my view, it wasn’t just a question of moving from an unaffordable rented space to a more financially sustainable footing: you can run a viable and socially valuable arts organisation without a fixed space. A permanent space positions illustration as a fixture in the UK’s civic visual arts offer, one that largely reinforces the value of elite cultures. Creating a permanent museum/public gallery says that

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Figure 4.16. New River Head, photographed by Justin Piperger, 2020.

Figure 4.17. New River Head, photographed by Justin Piperger, 2020.

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Figure 4.18. New River Head, photographed by Justin Piperger, 2020.

Figure 4.19. New River Head, photographed by Justin Piperger, 2020.

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illustration, the art we experience in our everyday lives, is an equally valuable visual art form, and that people have a right to it. It means we can build reliable services and sustainable relationships with audiences too. Converting existing buildings is usually a more affordable and environmentally sustainable route than constructing something new. For years, we looked at deconsecrated churches, disused subterranean carparks, and other decommissioned and derelict buildings before finding New River Head, through serendipity. It really was quite an amazing discovery: a virtually unknown, half-acre site with a range of former industrial spaces at different scales that could accommodate different uses, and steeped in history that would give us a strong foundation for developing site-specific illustration practice. rachel emily taylor  

The New River Head site is not a white gallery space, which is often easier to work with as it’s a ‘blank canvas’. What are the challenges and opportunities that you foresee navigating this site as a centre for illustration?

olivia ahmad  

I’m not sure if a ‘blank canvas’ would be easier to work with than an existing storied place with constraints. Sometimes, parameters can unlock creativity — a bit like how the limits of something like a printed book or a brief can elicit unexpected responses or new approaches from an illustrator. It’s true that the buildings at New River Head weren’t specified for a public arts space though. The site was established in 1613 as the hub of the UK’s first major profit-making water utility company. The buildings that remain on the site today were functional, essentially the casing for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century water pumping technologies. Tim Ronalds Architects are the principal designers of the project and their approach is to work with the buildings’ unusual shapes, and to do only what is necessary to make the space accessible and easy to navigate. The site has a range of distinctive spaces of varying size and character: that plays well into our ambition for a place that will accommodate different people using the space for different purposes. I think that changes of scale also work well for the display of illustration: some of the work we show is the ephemera of daily life and, for that, a domestic-scale display space makes sense, but we will also show much larger-scale work, for which the tank-like spaces will provide a dramatic frame. One of the greatest strengths of working with an existing heritage site is that, while the name of your organisation might be on the lease or deed, it can’t truly be ‘owned’ by any one entity. Illustration and Historical Landscapes

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New River Head had a long and influential life before we acquired it, local activists campaigned for decades for it to be put into public use, and its influence on the development of profit-making utility supply (both in engineering terms and culturally) has a tangible influence on people’s lives in London today. The site’s stories belong to everyone and, by occupying it, we have a duty to tell them, in collaboration with other people. This, along with the physical shape of the site, is pushing us to do things we wouldn’t have otherwise considered. rachel emily taylor  

What plans does Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration have to work with illustrators to engage with the site and its historical narratives?

olivia ahmad  

For us, everyone is an illustrator (or can be, given the right support and tools). Broadly, our plans are to interpret the site’s stories for the public with illustrators, who could be school students creating a sculptural work for the gardens, or someone who has an established illustration practice making a series of publications for our café. Engaging people with New River Head will be an ongoing commitment and how this happens will evolve over time, as we find out more about the site’s history and the needs of our local communities, and as the practice of illustration changes. Our initial plans include creating a series of static interpretation panels that will be distributed around the outside of the building. These will tell people why the site is there and support people as they decode the physical environment around them, for example, by explaining land formations and the shapes of buildings, or by marking spots where rushing water can be heard from underground. To begin this process, we have created some temporary interpretation panels for a publicly accessible area at the west end of the site. These feature illustrations by Nina Chakrabarti that include a map of the New River’s course and diagrams that explain the New River Company’s water distribution system far more clearly than text descriptions. Nina’s illustrations also enable a more ‘human’ understanding of the experiences of people who lived hundreds of years ago. For example, one panel text explains that people swam illegally in the New River in the eighteenth century, but Nina’s images of people in the river suggest the release of being in water in a way that we can relate to from swimming or washing ourselves. Nina’s drawing of a youthful seventeenth-century water carrier has sweat running across his brow, telling us he’s feeling the strain, although her upright figure replaces the muchreproduced 1688 etching of a London water carrier by Marcellus

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Laroon,66 who is a broken and pitiful figure (and thought to be inaccurate). When New River Head opens, there will be a series of sitespecific installations in its buildings. People who work as illustrators will be commissioned to create these. Their work will serve some soft functional purposes, such as absorbing sound in the high-ceilinged and sure-to-be busy café area, or drawing people toward a part of a building that might be perceived as a ‘dead end’. We will shape the themes of these installations with the illustrators we work with, but their purpose will be quite different from the outdoor panels that explain the site’s architecture. The installations will deal with the impact that New River Head had, and continues to have, on people’s lives. For example, the New River Company motto is a line from the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament: ‘I caused it to rain upon one city.’ It suggests the company as a divine entity, bestowing water on the City of London, and offering a kind of deliverance from disease: this self-image is evident in their logo too, in which the god-like hand of Providence sprinkles water onto London from the clouds (they certainly thought a lot of themselves!). The next line in the religious texts is, ‘and on another city I did not rain’. To me, this creates the potential for a work that references New River Head’s past as a coal-burning site that redistributed water, and the changes brought about by such practices that we now know create disastrous changing weather, droughts, and floods. Ahead of opening the site, we will commission one or more ‘community illustrators’: illustrators whose practice is rooted in facilitation and active listening. Their role will be to connect with people living locally, find out what their needs and interests are, and then work with them to interpret the heritage of their area and the site. We don’t yet know what heritage themes this work will cover, what the outcomes will be, or how and where we will install them. These projects will be co-produced, and so, beyond the parameters that we can’t get away from – budget, time, and making any public-facing outcomes accessible and safe – we will not be imposing an agenda. We will also be hosting residencies, focused on research-led illustration practice. As with our co-produced community projects, we are open to what the themes and outcomes will be — there may not even be a tangible outcome in a traditional sense. However, we will be asking resident illustrators to start their project with a genuine question to which there is not a known answer, because we want residency projects to expand both the illustrator’s practice and challenge the dominant stories that circulate about New River Head. These tend to focus on the Illustration and Historical Landscapes

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New River story as a simple triumph of engineering and infrastructure — it was, but to focus only on those aspects ignores a much richer picture, and the histories of everyone but the project's financiers and surveyors. rachel emily taylor  

What do you hope that the Centre achieves with the residencies — a relationship with the local community and an engagement with the site?

Figure 4.20. Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, Tim Ronalds Architects, 2020.

olivia ahmad  

Both, really. We hope that the residencies will surface unexpected, new information or propose new interpretations of the site that will support different kinds of public engagement. I hope that, by taking an exploratory approach as a starting point, the residencies will invite questions like, ‘Who owns water?’ Or, ‘Who gets to shape our city?’ Rather than offering a more didactic, ‘Did you know that X happened on X date?’ Working with history is so exciting to me because it recognises that many of the seeming inevitabilities of life – such as, ‘I need to pay for water, something that’s from the Earth and keeps me alive’ – are invented. Illustration is so brilliant because, through it, you can highlight these things and then actually see what alternatives might look like.

rachel emily taylor  

After running the initial Engine House Residency  67 with Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe, do you see any potential relationship between illustration and heritage?

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olivia ahmad  

Illustration and heritage interpretation are closely aligned practices. Both involve a process of research, translation, and, most frequently, dialogue with an audience – often, progress through these steps is cyclical rather than linear. For me, Laura and Philip’s residency project New River Folk perfectly encapsulates a valuable and maybe even vital role that illustration can play in heritage, which is to make visible those people whose stories aren’t found in the material culture preserved by museums and archives, which is overwhelmingly that of a White male elite. There are many people doing important work to address this by reinterpreting the material that exists and collecting new material: another way to address what is missing from the shelves and drawers of civic institutions is to make new objects. New River Folk is a speculative museum of objects made by Laura and Philip that interprets the lives of three real working-class women and men who lived around the seventeeth century: Joan Starkey (a tankard-bearer) Mary Woolaston (a wellkeeper known as ‘Black Mary’) and William ‘Mollitrape’ Smythe (a mole catcher). The archival fragments that exist about these people are not enough to give them a presence alongside people like Hugh Myddelton (the first director of the New River Company, who is commemorated all over Islington). However, by combining them with research about the time they lived, some speculation, and materials found in the places they once lived, Laura and Philip have created a tangible and engaging record of their lives. This isn’t a verifiable documentary record, but I don’t think it needs to be. When Laura and Philip opened their museum to the public at New River Head, as part of Open House Festival in 2022, they interpreted it so that it was clear that their work was a mediation between research and speculation, and visitors understood this playful approach, enjoying the ‘reveal’ of seemingly outlandish truths through Laura and Philip’s distinct voice.

Olivia Ahmad draws parallels between illustration and heritage interpretation practice, and it allows us to speculatively create a record of historical people’s lives. It has the potential to play a ‘vital role’ in highlighting the lives of those who are not found in archives and museums, disrupting current historical narratives. As the relationship between illustration and heritage continues to be explored by practitioners and institutions, so shall the academic engagement with the discipline — and there is potential to use the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration site as a testing ground.

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When I visited Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration’s Open House event, Centre In Progress, in September 2022, I viewed a series of works that had been exhibited in the space, including Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe’s New River Folk (see pages 65-70), but also Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán’s Lost Springs, Coming Spring (see Figure 4.23),68 which includes text from the New River Company motto, ‘I caused it to rain upon one city’. Yuán’s work was a large illustration that stretched across the interior of the derelict building that reminded me of the Bayeux Tapestry. The work is a syntheses of drawings from site visits and drawings of scenes from archived photographs and documents. Could this work be thought to ‘make visible’ past scenes? Yuán overlays redrawn archival images of people from the 1780s, 1920s, and 1940s, with reportage drawings of the contemporary site. The work reminds me of Miriam Elgon’s picturebook Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal (see pages 108-115) and the work also creates ‘“feeling” of time and place’ through the ‘piecing together’ 69 of parts that are enmeshed through illustration practice.

Figure 4.21. Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, Tim Ronalds Architects, 2020.

Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration might not focus on outcomes for a number of the residencies — ‘There might not be a tangible outcome in a traditional sense’, Ahmad stated — since there is further room to explore the intangibility of the heritage and illustrative process when there is no pressure for an outcome. This has been a line of enquiry that I have been keen to explore, questioning how illustration practice could be ‘uncontained’ outside of the museum.70 For this, I established a working relationship with the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth (see pages 96-98, 128). I wrote a brief, which was titled The Outsider (2018–19) and was supported 166

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Figure 4.22. Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán, Lost Springs, Coming Spring, 2022.

Figure 4.23. Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán, Lost Springs, Coming Spring [installation shot], 2022. Photographed by Paul Grover.

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by Arts Council England, to explore the Heathcliff character in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I worked with children from Keighley (local to the museum) to explore their relationship to their surrounding landscape. The sessions took place outside of the museum, predominantly on Penistone Hill (an area notable to Emily Brontë’s life and work), and their interactions with the site illustrated ideas of a ‘contemporary’ Heathcliff. In a sense, this was a project without an outcome, and was an example of a ‘dematerialisation of practice’ (see page 26). What can working with historic sites reveal about the intangibility of illustration (see page 25) and its role when applied as a method71 in heritage-making? Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration’s work with the New River Head can illuminate the potential relationship between an institution and a heritage site. In the discussion with Ahmad, she raises questions of ‘duty’, not just to the past, but also to the present day. The ‘community illustrators’ will engage with people living locally, whose stories, wishes, interests, and needs will be the driving force behind the Centre’s aims. Returning to the discussion on the angel of history (see pages 31-32), we must not forget that even when illustrators work with the past as a subject, we are rooted in the present, and the work has an impact on the future, like heritage, which is ‘from the past, in the present, for the future’.72 What is the purpose of the work and who is it for? What impact can it have on their lives – and the lives of those yet to be born?

1. A landscape is part of Earth’s surface that can be viewed at one time from one place. In this chapter, a number of the projects are about landscape, such as Leah Fusco’s work with Northeye and my project with the Brontë Parsonage Museum. 2. A site is a place where something is, was, or will be. It is a term used in archeology to refer to a place in which evidence of past activity is preserved. In this chapter, Gareth Proskourine-Barnett responds to the Birmingham City Library, Caitlin McLoughlin visits asylums, Olivia Ahmad’s work at Quentin Blake Centre of Illustration – these places are all ‘sites’. 3. The separation and critique of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage is well established in heritage literature, and it is an artificial separation. I recommend the reader refers to Rodney Harrison’s Heritage: Critical Approaches (London: Routledge, 2013), p.211, and his paper, which considers the implications of working in the expanded field that is created for heritage if these boundaries are dissolved, titled ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene’, Heritage & Society, 8, 1 (2015), pp.24-42. 4. David Lowenthal, ‘Natural and Cultural Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 11, 1, (2005), pp.81– 92. 5. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p.79. 6. Lesley Head, Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Change (London: Arnold, 2000). 7. David Lowenthal, ‘Natural and Cultural Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 11, 1 (2005), pp.81–92. 8. The terms ‘vulnerable’ and ‘wildernesses’ are language used in UNESCO policy documents to describe landscapes.

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9. A palimpsest is a manuscript page, where the writing has been removed (scraped or washed off) and reused for another document. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος, palímpsêstos, meaning 'again' and 'scrape'. The Ancient Greeks used wax-coated tablets to write on with a stylus, and erased the surface with wax to reuse. 10. M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994); Mike Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 2001); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 11. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p. 79. 12. Tim Ingold, The Temporality of the Landscape (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis, 1993), p.152. 13. Rodney Harrison, ‘Heritage as future-making practices’, Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (London: UCL Press, 2020), p. 65. 14. Rafael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994). 15. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p.3. 16. Auschwitz is an example of the various controversies around whether historical buildings should be carefully preserved or allowed to decay. There is also a controversy over the site having a visitors centre and café, and whether or not that is appropriate. 17. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p.3. 18. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p.3. 19. Caitlin Desilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 20. Tim Edensor, ‘Walking in the British countryside: reflexivity, embodied practices and ways to escape’, Body & Society, 6, 3–4 (2000), pp.81–106; Tim Ingold, Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception Series (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). 21. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011). [Originally written in the 1940s.] 22. Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (New York: Penguin, 2013). 23. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, p.147–148. 24. Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p.13. 25. Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, p.12. 26. Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, p. 33. 27. Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, p. 21. 28. John Berger, ‘John Berger, Life Drawing’, Berger on Drawing, ed. by Jim Savage (London: Occasional Press, 2007), p. 3. 29. Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, p. 12. 30. ‘Sympathetic magic’ was a term coined by James George Frazer in his book The Golden Bough (London: Macmillian and co., 1890). 31. Rodney Harrison, ‘Heritage as future-making practices’, p. 65. 32. Helen Wickstead, ‘Between the Lines: Drawing Archaeology’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 549. 33. Wickstead, Between the Lines, p.9. 34. Wickstead, Between the Lines, p.19. 35. Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello, Reportage Illustration, Illustration and Historical Landscapes

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Visual Journalism, (London: Bloomsbury Viusal Arts, 2018). 36. Gannon and Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, p.67. 37. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Boston, MA: The New England Magazine, 1892). 38. Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Madhouse (New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887). 39. English Heritage, Our Vision and Values [accessed 24 June 2022]. 40. Fusco, Illustrating Northeye. 41. A ‘saltmarsh’ is a coastal wetland between land and open saltwater that is regularly flooded and drained by tides. 42. Fusco, Illustrating Northeye. 43. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 44. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 45. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 46. Raymond Williams, Border Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960). 47. Doreen Massey cited ‘Doreen Massey on Space’, Social Science Bites, 8 May 2013 [accessed 1 February 2023]. 48. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 49. Leah Fusco, Northeye (2021) [accessed 12 December 2022]. 50. Smith, The Uses of Heritage, p.3. 51. A ‘year leader’ on BA (hons) Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts is the lead tutor who directs the study for a year group. In this instance, Jen Franklin is the year leader for the final year students on the course. 52. Method acting was developed by Lee Strasberg, and based on Konstantin Stanislavski’s System, which was discussed in Chapter 2. 53. Rachel Emily Taylor and Jen Franklin, ‘Method Illustration’, Journal of Illustration, 9, (2022), pp.115–142. 54. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 55. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett is currently undertaking a PhD in the Critical & Historical Studies Programme at the Royal College of Art, titled, Brutalist Architecture on the Internet: Future Territories/ Echoes from the Ruins. 56. Oliver Wainwright, ‘“The Council tenants weren’t going to be allowed back”: how Britain’s “ugliest building” was gentrified’, Guardian, Tuesday 26 July 2022, [accessed 29 December 2022] 57. John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996 [accessed 29 December 2022]. 58. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022) 59. Nick Cass, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022) 60. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Portland, OR: Zero Books, 2014). 61. Stephanie Black, Illumination through illustration: Positioning illustration as practice-led research (doctoral thesis, University of the West of England, 2014), p.5. 62. Black, Illumination through Illustration, p.5. 63. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022) 64. Black, Illumination through Illustration, p.5. 65. Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, p.21. 66. Marcellus Laroon, New River Water, 1868, 247mm x 163mm, the British Museum, London. 170

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67. The Engine House Residency was funded by the Barbara and Philip Denny Trust. 68. Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán’s work was undertaken as part of the Engine House Graduate Residency (2022) at Quentin Blake Centre of Illustration, which was supported by the Barbara and Philip Denny Trust. 69. Miriam Elgon, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022) 70. There is also potential to explore how illustration as virtual reality or augmented reality could be tested inside and outside of heritage spaces. This is an emerging field of practice and I anticipate practitioners and institutions will engage with it – funding dependent. 71. Gannon and Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, p.15. 72. Rodney Harrison, Beyond ‘Natural’ and ‘Cultural’ Heritage, p.27.

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Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Conclusion Illustration_&_Heritage_29_6_23.indd 173

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Conclusion

Figure 5.1. Tamsin Nagel, Hazelnut Token II, 2022.

The illustrator can be a ‘critical figure in the heritage process’,1 as they can present institutional critique, activate an archive or collection, craft new heritage, engage new audiences, and challenge Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD). Illustration can also be critical due to its importance as a communication method in heritage, apparent in the labelling, narrativizing, and interpretation of history. Arguably, illustration (as both a noun and a verb) has a natural place in heritage-making, it may go undetected as a ‘fugitive’2 process, but it also can be consciously employed as a method. Illustration can function in various ways when engaging with heritage, and this book has presented different examples of methods and approaches. In the Introduction, I outlined the following questions that formed a starting point for this book: what are the similar functions of heritage and illustration? How can an illustrator ‘give voice’ to a historical person? How can an illustrator disrupt an archive or museum? How can an illustrator represent a historical landscape or site? These questions steered the direction of each chapter and the selection of case studies. The practitioner interviews illuminated the various methods illustrators can adopt when working with heritage, and also, raised questions, and I will highlight a number of these in this conclusion. The illustration practitioner should be aware of their positionality in relation to the collection, and the ethical implications of navigating engagements with cultures, historical people, and artefacts. When working with Conclusion

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heritage, I view the illustrator with the metaphor of the prism: the light (narrative, voice) passes through the glass (the illustrator) and refracts, which is representative of the practitioner leaving evidence of themselves in their work. The illustrator can never fully be removed from the subject they are communicating, which is why positionality is a key consideration in heritage-making. As noted in the introduction, once again, I want to acknowledge my own positionality: a British illustrator and educator at Camberwell College of Arts, London. I am limited due to my own geography and nationality. I interviewed other practitioners to include multiple voices in this book, but, even so, this can still be expanded. I never aimed to provide a complete survey of all illustration practitioners engaging with heritage worldwide, as this would be an impossible task. The field of illustration and heritage is constantly developing, as are the laws and conversations in museums regarding representation and repatriation. Therefore, there are limitations in this research, but I hope this is the start of a conversation and can provide a reference point for future work, and I invite responses. Throughout this book, there have been questions of truth, ethics, and morality. What is an illustrator’s responsibility when working with heritage? We cannot ask the dead for their permission when we include them in our work, but how we portray them can affect how others make sense of the world in the present and the future. Miriam Elgon, who portrayed Pablo Fanque (the first Black circus owner in Britain) in her work, says, ‘I was engaging with the audience of now, thinking of what they need and current issues with representation in children’s books. Non-White characters are underrepresented generally, but particularly in stories that are historical or magical.’3 By bringing particular narratives to the forefront, illustration can be important in reshaping how people perceive their culture, heritage, and identity. Like the angel of history (see pages 31-32), the illustrator can act as a protector or messenger that guides people ‘through ambiguous moral spaces’.4 I want to remind the reader that heritage is a process that assembles future worlds – and through that very act, do we not have a responsibility to the world that we shape and leave behind? Illustration practitioners can bring to light marginalised figures in history – such as Pablo Fanque.5 David Jones,6 and Mary Woolaston.7 We could hypothesise that this is because illustration is a tool that can imaginatively respond to their absence in historical records, whereas well-known historical people are already perceived to be ‘visible’ and do not need to be reconstructed, and there is less to speculate. Olivia Ahmad recognises this, noting that illustration can play ‘a valuable and maybe even vital role […] in heritage, which is to make visible those people whose stories aren’t found in the material culture preserved by museums and archives’.8 I encourage museums and historical sites to engage with illustrators, as their practice can enrich, complicate, and subvert dominant narratives. This can draw new visitors to a place, ones who previously might not have felt welcome, an example of this being Studio Carrom’s residency at the William Morris 176

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Gallery. Although I recognise that this could be a trend in current illustration practice, there is great potential for it to be employed as an interpretation method at heritage sites. Illustrators piece together fragments from the past, such as archival documents, artefacts, and historical photographs. Illustration can be used to synthesise these parts into a cohesive whole, such as a final outcome. When applied in this way, illustration occupies a space of in-betweenness,9 where the past and present are brought together.10 The act is comparable to heritage, where practitioners assemble11 meaning from the relics of the past as part of a ‘regime of care’.12 This book includes interviews with practitioners who articulate this process: Miriam Elgon describes the act as ‘an elaborate “piecing together”’;13 Laura Copsey discusses how illustration might be used to ‘speculatively fill the gaps’.14 We have also seen examples [of both these acts] in practice, such as Serena Katt’s Sunday’s Child and in Sharpay Chenyuè Yuán’s Lost Springs, Coming Spring. Both of these works use 2D image-making techniques (drawing, collage, painting) to mesh together archival photographs with other images, such as family photographs or location drawings. The integration of these historical images can act as an anchor to a time, and arguably, could attribute authenticity15 to the work. When illustration is applied in this way, it does not give an accurate or truthful portrayal of the past, but, arguably, it portrays a sense of a time. Like a performer on the stage, the inauthentic constructed image might trigger an authentic organic experience in an audience, allowing them to imagine what the past might have been. Alongside acting as glue to synthesise separate images and documents into a cohesive whole, illustration can also be used to create juxtapositions and links in the portrayal of history. Catherine Anyango Grünewald employs illustration in this way to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘emphasise a narrative that is not implied in the original [image]’’.16 This can be achieved by placing images side by side on a page like in Dead Man Walking. It can also be established through curatorial strategies; in Kept Within the Bounds, the children’s portraits were exhibited at child height and beneath the portraits of the White male Foundling Hospital donors in the Foundling Museum’s Picture Gallery. This drew attention to the children’s status, both in terms of historical position and their importance in relation to the museum’s collection – the donors are remembered, their portraits have been chosen as important and have been treasured. This method can highlight a historical narrative that might have otherwise been overlooked. Illustration does not always seek to fill gaps in absent spaces. Amy Goodwin noted, ‘It was important to leave space where there were gaps in the historical record that I hadn’t been able to fill, and they were still visible as gaps.’17 Goodwin does not figuratively represent the historical fairground females, but, instead, constructs illustrative spaces using techniques from signwriting. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe sought to visualise historical people from the New River Head, but rather than creating figurative representations, they did this by making objects that they might Conclusion

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have owned or used. It is worth noting that these examples incorporate physical spaces and 3D making. Both examples are situated illustrations, where the work can form a dialogue with the environment. In heritage, an illustrator does not always make a ‘final outcome’. Instead, it can be ‘applied as methodology’,18 particularly when working with communities to encourage discussion. For example, in workshops and interviews, participants can be guided to illustrate their experience, which can be communicated through drawing or model-making – it is not limited by medium. Illustration can be a useful method to apply when the participants can’t express themselves clearly through words. Examples of this can be found in the workshops that formed the research behind my installation Kept Within the Bounds, Yeni Kim’s picturebook 바당밧 (Badangbat), and Leah Fusco’s project on Northeye. The illustration practitioner might shape the participants response through the instructions or materials they give, but even so, illustration could be used as a method in other disciplines (such as anthropology, ethnography, heritage research) to examine how communities understand their heritage and document their experience. As illustration practitioners continue to engage with heritage, attention must be placed on curation and how work is categorised. The language used by institutions can create a division between the two: ‘this is heritage’ and ‘this is illustration’. As Nick Cass proposed, ‘It would be interesting to not use the language […] at all.’19 This could be explored in future illustration projects that engage with curatorial strategies. Illustration is arguably part of the heritage process, but labelling it can make it appear as if it has been added in. Even so, when reflecting on our practice, language helps to contextualise the work and articulate how it functions in relation to the heritage process. When working with heritage, do illustrators make visible or give voice? Both have appeared throughout this book. In the interviews, Gareth Proskourine-Barnett asks, ‘What is visible and what is unseen?’; 20 Catherine Anyango Grünewald describes ‘scarring’ her paper with her pencil when drawing, ‘So you see what is underneath [the surface of the paper]. It relates to the idea of something being there that might not actually be seen’; 21 Olivia Ahmad describes illustration as ‘[making] visible’ 22 the stories of people absent in historical record; Leah Fusco has moved away from using the term visibility as it is not ‘absolute’.23 In comparison, in my own practice, I use to give voice, as I do not aim to bring historical people back to life and make them fully visible. In my research, I found that a voice could also be non-verbal; a voice can be an image. Illustration cannot truthfully make a historical person reappear, but, using the concept of voice to discuss the practice enables us to consider a different kind of visibility – one that is, like heritage, both tangible and intangible. Perhaps, both phrases make visible and give voice can be applied to illustrators working with heritage to enable a discussion of how it operates, and I look forward to that discussion developing.

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Illustration is fundamental in heritage-making. Let us return to the opening of the book: the hazelnut token, encased in a cabinet, placed alongside a caption, and held within a collection. The hazelnut is encompassed by a story, which is communicated to an audience through museum interpretation. The narration of the hazelnut is part of an illustrative process, allowing an audience to imagine a past time, and it is this example that I recommend we build upon as we continue to explore illustration and heritage.

1. Peter Howard, ‘Editorial: Heritage and Art’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2, 4, (1998), pp.61–3, p.61. 2. Catrin Morgan, keynote, ‘Bodies in Spaces’, Illustration Research Methods Symposium, Kingston University, (February 2021). 3. Miriam Elgon, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 4.Darryl Clifton, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 5. Miriam Elgon’s picturebook, Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal (2019) focused on the historical equestrian performer and circus proprietor, Pablo Fanque. 6. Geoff Coupland’s exhibition A Mythic Understanding (2018) offered a multi-faceted view of the life of painter and poet, David Jones. 7. Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe’s New River Folk included the names of people who lived and worked at the New River Head, like Mary Woolaston. 8. Olivia Ahmad, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 9. This is a reference to a discussion in chapter one, where I describe Rachel Moore’s description of the function of nostalgia, see: Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton [nostalgia] (London: Afterall Books, 2006). 10. Moore, Hollis Frampton [nostalgia]. 11. ‘Assemble’ has been used throughout this book, but notably in Chapter 3, which aligned the illustrator’s practice to that of an archaeologist. 12. Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, p.35). 13. Miriam Elgon, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 14.Laura Copsey, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 15. I refer to ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ authenticity in Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism (Chichester: Wiley, 1996). 16. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 17. Amy Goodwin, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 18. Gannon and Fauchon, Illustration Research Methods, p.15. 19. Nick Cass, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 20. Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 21. Catherine Anyango Grünewald, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 22. Olivia Ahmad, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022). 23. Leah Fusco, interview with Rachel Emily Taylor (online, 2022).

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Interview Glossary olivia ahmad  

is a curator, editor, and writer. She is Artistic Director at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, and she was the editor for Varoom, the UK’s leading illustration magazine with an international view of contemporary practice and industry.

catherine anyango grünewald  

is an artist and lecturer. She is a Senior Lecturer in Illustration at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Her publications include the graphic novels The Heart of Darkness (2010) and Scandorama (2018).

dr nick cass  

is Associate Professor in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the editor of the book Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces (2020).

darryl clifton 

is an illustrator and educator. He is the Illustration Programme Director at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and has previously been on the associate board for the Association of Illustrators (AOI). copsey   is an experimental illustrator, researcher, and amateur archaeologist. Her work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, exploring traces of human endeavour from history, within traditional trades or museum collections. She teaches illustration at Kingston University.

laura

geoff coupland  (aka zeel )

is an illustrator, comic creator, printmaker, 3D maker, writer, designer, curator, and educator. He is a senior lecturer in Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, the founder of Camberwell Comic Club, and the co-founder of The Golden Thread Project,  which engages in diverse folklore projects, commercially, creatively, educationally, and as research. is a designer and maker. Through his practice espergaerde he works with process and provenance to make objects that facilitate creativity. He is a tutor at Goldsmiths University.

philip crew e 

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miriam elgon  

is an illustrator, artist, designer and educator. She is interested in projecting herself into different times and places, imagining herself as other people through inhabiting narratives and creating her own. She has worked with the collections department of the Royal Opera House and trained in cultural heritage at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

cecilia hei mee flumé  

is an illustrator and researcher. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Visual Communication at Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design. Her project examines how graphic-novel-storytelling practices can be a tool for interpreting and analysing historical and contemporary issues of transnational adoption, heritage and betweenship.

dr leah fusco  

is an illustrator, artist, and lecturer. Her work draws on geographic and historic subject matter in place research, exploring the use of mapping, narrative and imaging technologies. She is an Associate Professor of Illustration at Kingston University.

dr amy goodwin 

is a traditional signwriter and educator. Alongside working to commission – predominantly in the fairground, circus, and steam heritage industries – she teaches on MA Illustration at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at the University of Plymouth. 

isabel greenberg  

is an illustrator and writer, and the author of three acclaimed graphic novels: The Encylopedia of Early Earth (2015), The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2017), and Glass Town (2020).

serena katt  

is an illustrator, researcher, and educator. Her work explores how illustration can be used as an active tool for understanding, interpreting, and re-evaluating dominant narratives and discourse about historical events. She is currently a senior lecturer in Illustration at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.

yeni kim 

is an award-winning illustrator, designer, and researcher. She has worked in various fields including illustration, graphic design, branding, UX and textile design, and is an Assistant Professor in Visual Communication at Hongik University.

Interview Glossary

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caitlin mcloughlin 

is an independent researcher, graphic designer, and illustrator. She is the managing editor and designer at Worms, a magazine and publisher celebrating female and non-binary writer culture. 

gareth proskourine - barnett  

is an illustrator, researcher, and educator. He is currently working towards a PhD in the department of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art and is the Course Leader for BA Art and Design at Birmingham City University. 

priya sundram  

is an illustrator, designer, and educator. She is cofounder of Studio Carrom, a multidisciplinary design studio based in London and Bangalore and an associate lecturer on MA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

nia thandapani  

is a graphic designer and design historian. She is co-founder of Studio Carrom, a multidisciplinary design studio based in London and Bangalore. 

pat wingshan wong  

is an illustrator, researcher, and educator. In 2019, she initiated Barter Archive, a community-led project investigating how the new and the old interact in the 300-yearold Billingsgate Fish Market. She is an Assistant Professor in the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.

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Bibliography Alberro, Alexander and Stimson, Blake, Institutional critique: an anthology of artists’ writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). American Alliance of Museums, AAM Code of Ethics for Museums [accessed 15 January 2023]. Anyango Grünewald, Catherine, ‘Re-Collecting Memories’, OEI #88-89 (2020). Appiah, Kwame Antony, ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’, The Atlantic, June 2020 [accessed 5 September 2022]. Armitage, Helen, ‘Andrea Fraser: Too Shocking for a US Retrospective’, The Culture Trip, 11 January 2017 [accessed 28 June 2015]. Ashley, Susan, ‘First Nations on View: Canadian Museums and Hybrid Representations of Culture’, eTopia (2005), pp.31–40. Auslander, Philip, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1997). Auslander, Philip, ‘Just Be Yourself: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’ in Acting Reconsidered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edition, ed. by Phillip B. Zarrilli (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). Barlow, John Perry, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996 [accessed 29 December 2022]. Barrie, James Matthew, Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (London: Hodder & Stoughton,1911). Bender, Barbara, ‘Introduction: Landscape, Meaning and Action’ in Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Bender (Oxford: Berg, 1993). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) [Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 1940.] Berger, John, ‘John Berger, Life Drawing’, Berger on Drawing, ed. Jim Savage, (London: Occasional Press, 2007). Berger, John, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). Bishop, Claire, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’, October, 140 (2012), pp.91–112. Black, Hannah, Hannah Black’s Letter to the Whitney Biennial’s Curator’s: Dana Schutz Painting Must Go (2017) [accessed 18 May 2022]. Black, Niki and Farley, Rebecca, ‘Mapping contemporary art in the heritage experience’, Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020). Black, Stephanie, Illumination through Illustration: Positioning illustration as practice-led research (doctoral thesis, University of the West of England, 2014). Bloom, Paul, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (London: Bodley Head, 2006). Bly, Nellie, Ten Days in a Madhouse (New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887). Boal, Augusto, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1992).

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Note: Page locators in italic refer to figures. Ahmad, Olivia 65, 158–65, 168, 176 An Alternative Archive of Brutalist Architecture (2008-18) 148–57, 149, 150 Angelus Novus (1920) 31–2, 32, 48 Anyango Grünewald, Catherine 100–7, 102, 103, 105, 106, 177 Appointment (1999) 99, 99 archaeology 107, 137–8 archives, working with 94–5, 100–7, 107–8, 108–20, 177 assemblage 107–8, 108–20, 177 Association of Critical Heritage Studies 21, 68 audiences, engaging new 95, 176–7 with Distant Fellowship 120–1, 123–6, 127 authenticity 22–4, 42–3, 177 cool 23, 24, 27 hot 23, 60, 67, 142 Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) 21–2, 22–3, 39 disrupting 48, 68, 70, 100, 125, 156 Badangbat (2020) 73–8, 75, 76, 77, 78 Barlow, John Perry 152 Barter Archive 138–40, 139 Benjamin, Walter 31 Bexhill Museum 96, 147, 148 Blackwell, Sue 98 British Museum 89–90, 129n7, 138 Brontë Parsonage Museum 96–9, 108, 128, 166–8 Brown, Michael 103, 103 Brutalist architecture, an alternative archive 148–57, 149, 150, 153 Calle, Sophie 99, 99 Cass, Nick 96–9, 156 characters 22, 48, 67, 68, 69, 70 imagined foundling 42–3, 47, 61 New River Folk 64, 67–8 non-White 113–14 Chen Jianghong 52 choral voice 40, 70–8 chorality 40–1, 73 classification 104, 153–4, 156 Clifton, Darryl 26–7, 28–9 colonialism 12, 21, 89–91 Colouring In: The Past symposium 30, 35n65, 157 community, local 120–1, 123–6, 127, 163–4, 168 Copsey, Laura and Philip Crewe 62, 62, 63–8, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 120, 165, 177–8 Coupland, Geoff 70, 71–2, 148

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Craig, Sienna 62 Crewe, Philip and Laura Copsey 62, 62, 63–8, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 120, 165, 177–8 culture, project to capture disappearing 73–8, 75, 76, 77, 78 curation 20–1, 27, 89, 93, 178 Dead Man Walking (2022) 100, 101, 102, 105 decolonisation and museums 91, 123 director, illustration practitioner as 58–61 Distant Fellowship: Morris & South Asia (2021) 120–7, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127 Drawing Northeye (2019) 143 Earthworks I (2015) 146 Earthworks II (2015) 146 Elgon, Miriam 108–14, 110, 111, 112, 113, 166, 176 An Elite Experience for Everyone (2005) 100, 126 Emotion Memory 43 empathy 48–51 Empire and Collecting 90 English Heritage 22–3, 142 ethical responsibility 28–9, 30–1, 41, 68, 79, 95, 98–9 fairground females 115–20, 116, 117, 118, 177 family history 52–8, 53, 54, 56, 57 Family in Wartime (2012-19) 22, 28, 52 Fauchon, Mireille 24, 78, 108 field work 137–42, 148 Flintham, Matthew 148 Flumé, Cecilia Hei Mee 30, 31, 49 Foundling Museum project children's workshops 42–3, 42, 43, 46, 47, 60, 61, 78, 120 disappearing children 61, 120 foundling tokens 9–11, 9, 10, 175 giving voice to foundlings 11, 42–3, 47 Kept Within the Bounds 44–8, 44, 45, 49, 60–1, 177 Picture Gallery 44, 44, 45, 81n36 testimonies of foundlings 42 Franklin, Jen 147 Fraser, Andrea 68–9, 69, 100, 130n32 Freud Museum 89, 90, 94, 99, 99 From the Freud Museum (1994) 89, 90, 94 Fusco, Leah 96, 142–8, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Gannon, Rachel 24, 30–1, 78 Gestus 61, 69, 70

ghosts 40, 60, 154 Glass Town (2020) 108, 109, 128 Goodwin, Amy 94–5, 115–20, 116, 117, 118, 177 graphic novels 52, 100–7, 102, 103, 105, 106, 128 Greenberg, Isabel 108, 109, 127, 128 guide, illustration practitioner as 120–7 Hall, Stuart 11 Halls, Jon 138 Harrison, Rodney 20, 21, 51, 58, 108 hauntings 102, 103, 155, 156 Hazelnut Token (2022) 9 Hazelnut Token II (2022) 175 Heart of Darkness (2010) 100, 104, 105, 106 heritage 11, 19–22 authenticity and 22–4 illustration and 25–32, 175 and positioning of illustrators 48, 97–8, 175, 178 'regime of care' 21, 58, 108, 177 Hicks, Dan 90–1 Hiller, Susan 89, 90, 94 Himid, Lubaina 62 historian, illustration practitioner as 100–7 historical figures 11, 34, 90, 92 bringing to light 27–8, 39, 49, 58–60, 92–3, 176 see also Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal (2019) Illustrating Northeye: An Exploration of Time, Matter, and Movement at a Historic Wetland Site (2021) 142–8 illustration expanded field of 24–5 heritage and 25–32, 175 Indigenous Australia (2015) 89–90 inside researcher 115, 119, 120, 131n45, 148 institutional critique 68–9, 91–3 inventor, illustration practitioner as 62–70 Jeju Island culture 73–8, 75, 76, 77, 78 Jones, David 70, 71–3, 72, 73, 148 Katt, Serena 52–8, 53, 54, 56, 57, 148, 177 Kept Within the Bounds (2016) 44–8, 44, 45, 49, 60–1, 177 see also Foundling Museum project Kim, Yeni 73–8, 75, 76, 77, 78 Klee, Paul 31–2, 32, 48 Krug, Nora 52

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landscapes 135–71 field work 137–42 future sites of practice 157–67 natural/and or cultural naming of 135 illustration practitioner and transient 142–8 illustration practitioner and virtual 148–57 Last Seen (2013) 100, 103, 103 Lillie, Rachel 138 Little Frank and His Carp (2001) 100, 130n32 location, drawing on 138 Lookering (2017) 145, 145, 147 Lost Springs, Coming Spring (2022) 166, 167, 177

Nagel, Tamsin 9, 175 New River Folk (2022) 62–8, 65, 66, 67, 70, 120, 165, 177–8 non-conventional heritage sites 140–2 nostalgia 19–20, 22

Maryland Historical Society 92–3, 92 Massey, Doreen 144 McLoughlin, Caitlin 140–2, 141, 147 McManus, Esther 108 Men in Drawers (2017-18) 62 Metalwork 1973-1880 (1992-3) 92, 93 'method illustration' 147 methodology, illustration applied as 78, 178 Mining the Museum (1992-3) 92, 92, 93, 105 moral responsibility 28–9, 30–1, 41, 68, 176 Morgan, Catrin 25, 27 Mother Tongue (2015) 49–51, 50 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) 68–9, 69 museum tours, appropriating 68–9, 69, 100, 126 museums brutish 90–1 captions 11, 22, 27, 68, 89, 99–100 colonial foundations 21, 89–91 curation 20–1, 27, 89, 93, 178 decolonisation 91, 123 disrupting 48, 65, 68–70, 96–100, 124, 125 ethical guidelines 28 exclusion of histories 89–90, 92–3 illustration practitioner as guide 120–7 institutional critique 68–9, 91–3 invisible barriers to entering 123–4 new audiences 120–1, 123–6, 127, 176–7 unexpected spaces 128 'unofficial' interventions 96 see also residencies A Mythic Understanding: Inspired by David Jones (2018) 70, 71–3, 72, 73, 148

Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal (2019) 108–14, 110, 111, 112, 113, 166, 176 Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks 107 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 140, 142 photographs 100–7, 102, 103, 105, 106, 177 positionality 12, 15n14, 41, 119, 120, 175–6 Proskourine-Barnett, Gareth 148–57, 149, 150, 153, 156

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objects 10–11, 64, 68–9, 120 as actors 60, 68, 70 fictional 63, 64, 64, 65, 66, 67, 67, 68, 120 O'Connor, Liam 138 On The Subject of Precarity (2019) 153 Open Casket (2016) 41 The Outsider (2018-19) 166–8 over-identification 49–51

Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration (previously House of Illustration) 62–3, 164, 166 heritage site 157–8, 159, 160, 161–2, 163 interview with Olivia Ahmad 158–65 Lost Springs, Coming Spring (2022) 166, 167, 177 New River Folk (2022) 62–8, 65, 66, 67, 70, 120, 165, 177–8 refraction 27, 51, 176 'regime of care' 21, 58, 108, 177 reportage illustration 138, 142, 166 representation 22, 28, 40–1, 51, 104, 113–14 moral responsibility 28–9, 30–1, 41, 68, 176 truthful 20, 27, 62, 68, 79, 177 research tool, illustration as a 11, 75–6, 75, 78, 138–40 residencies 96, 138 Brontë Parsonage Museum 96–9 Quentin Blake Centre 62–8, 163–7, 168 William Morris Gallery 120–7 Robins, Claire 100, 126

Shanks, Michael and Mike Pearson 107 Silent Sticks (2015) 58–60, 59, 61 situated illustrative works 138, 178 Smith, Laurajane 20, 21, 48, 135, 136 Spongecam (2019) 114 Stanislavski, Constantin 42, 43, 81n28 Stewart, Susan 19 stories, telling people's 28–9, 30–1, 41, 68, 79, 98–9 Studio Carrom (Sundram and Thandapani) 120–7, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127 subject, illustration practitioner as 51–8 Sunday's Child (2019) 52–8, 53, 54, 56, 57, 177 Sundram, Priya see Studio Carrom Sworn, Corin 58–60, 59 Thandapani, Nia see Studio Carrom theatre 23, 27–8, 43, 61, 69, 70 time 31–2, 43, 137, 154, 157 transient landscapes, illustrator practitioner and 142–8 virtual landscapes, illustrator practitioner and 148–57 visible, make 39, 68, 157, 165, 166, 176, 178 Vo, Danh 49–51, 50 voices 39–85 choral 40, 70–8 constructing 51 director, illustration practitioner as 58–61 give 11, 39, 40–1, 42–3, 47, 157, 178 as an image 43, 47 internal 40 inventor, illustration practitioner as 62–70 recordings as part of installations 60 subject, illustration practitioner as 51–8 William Morris Gallery 120–7, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127 Wilson, Fred 92–3, 92, 105 Wong, Pat WingShan 138–40, 139 The Yellow Wallpaper: An Illustrated Reader 140–2, 141 Yuán, Sharpay Chenyuè 166, 167, 177

Sarkar, Jhinuk 108 Schutz, Dana 41

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For Linda Illustration and Heritage has formed over many years, in conversation and collaboration with numerous people. The project began as a practice-based PhD in the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Heritage Consortium. I am grateful to my supervisors, Dr Becky Shaw, Dr Sharon Kivland, and Dr Deborah Middleton, for their patience and generosity, and to my examiners Dr Joanne Morra and Penny McCarthy. The work could not have been completed without the support of University of the Arts London, from whom I was awarded sabbatical leave and research funding. A special thanks to the students and staff in the Illustration Programme at Camberwell College of Arts. I am indebted to the practitioners and academics who generously shared their time, ideas, and work, participating in the conversations and interviews that weave through the text. I would like to specially thank Adrian Holme, Bryony Quinn, and Janis Balodis, for reading through drafts and offering their thoughts and feedback. I am grateful to my colleagues, who have provided a sounding-board for ideas, including, but not limited to, Darryl Clifton, Dr Leah Fusco, Dr Mireille Fauchon, Luise Vormittag, Dr. Allan S. Taylor, Jen Franklin, Becky Allen, Geoff Coupland. A special mention to my tutor, and late colleague, Paul Bowman, who taught me that illustrators have a moral responsibility to address political and social issues. Thanks to all my friends for being supportive and listening to me talk about ‘the book’, and thank you to: Louise Morris, Tamsin Nagel, Alice Ferrow, Aimee Webster, and Jess Williams. Finally, I would like to thank my father, Ken, who read through every draft of my PhD thesis. I have missed asking for his feedback and insight into Illustration and Heritage, but I know he would have been proud.

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