Bloomsbury Research in Illustration Series – serie

Illustrators are increasingly connecting with community groups and members of the public to explore links between people, local knowledge and image making practices. This raises a number of questions: What processes are set in motion when illustrators seek to engage with community? How can illustration bring to light the concerns, interests and challenges of a group of people? And can illustration help us think about the conditions of sociability more generally? Luise Vormittag argues that these questions go to the core of what it means to be political. Using both her own work and other illustrators’ projects as case studies Vormittag suggests that participatory illustration is a particularly effective medium for illuminating and reflecting on our social interdependence. Rather than accepting conventional, often nostalgic or identitarian notions of community, she positions it as a shared practice of communication and collaborative sense-making. Illustrations that refer to collective matters of concern can be the catalyst, focal point and trace of relational and dialogic interactions.This book is a contribution to the burgeoning field of illustration research that aims to extend the discipline through theoretically grounded practice-led research. By intertwining illustration practice with European philosophy and drawing on ideas from ethnography, translation studies and theories of the public sphere, Vormittag offers new conceptual pathways for rethinking the practice and potential of illustration.

Illustration and Heritage explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a ‘process’ that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and positions, and illustrators are a critical voice within the field.Grounding discussions in concepts fundamental to the illustrator, the book examines how the historical voice might be ‘found’ or reconstructed. Rachel Emily Taylor uses her own work and other illustrators’ projects as case studies to explore how the making of creative work – through the exploration of archival material and experimental fieldwork – is an important investigative process and engagement strategy when working with heritage. 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? This book is a contribution to the expanding field of illustration research that focusses on its position in heritage practice. Taylor examines the illustrator’s role within the field, while positioning it alongside the disciplines of museology, anthropology, archaeology, performance, and fine art.

Illustration and Heritage explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a ‘process’ that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and positions, and illustrators are a critical voice within the field.Grounding discussions in concepts fundamental to the illustrator, the book examines how the historical voice might be ‘found’ or reconstructed. Rachel Emily Taylor uses her own work and other illustrators’ projects as case studies to explore how the making of creative work – through the exploration of archival material and experimental fieldwork – is an important investigative process and engagement strategy when working with heritage. 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? This book is a contribution to the expanding field of illustration research that focusses on its position in heritage practice. Taylor examines the illustrator’s role within the field, while positioning it alongside the disciplines of museology, anthropology, archaeology, performance, and fine art.

Through an investigation of the Holloway prison writings of the suffragette Katie Gliddon, Mireille Fauchon explores illustration as a social research tool and creates within this book a model of practice-based enquiry.Illustrative methods and expressive literary forms - collage, mixed media, print and ficto-critical writing are used to illuminate the characteristics of the subject matter. Drawing on archival study, anecdotal experience, practical research methods and narrative enquiry, this book brings together themes of feminism, materiality and social history.Ideal for those studying illustration and qualitative research methods, Fauchon explores Gliddon’s life writing not only as a case study of an individual woman’s desires and aspiration for societal reform, she also creates a unique tool exemplifying how social research can become a work of narrative illustration in itself.

Through an investigation of the Holloway prison writings of the suffragette Katie Gliddon, Mireille Fauchon explores illustration as a social research tool and creates within this book a model of practice-based enquiry.Illustrative methods and expressive literary forms - collage, mixed media, print and ficto-critical writing are used to illuminate the characteristics of the subject matter. Drawing on archival study, anecdotal experience, practical research methods and narrative enquiry, this book brings together themes of feminism, materiality and social history.Ideal for those studying illustration and qualitative research methods, Fauchon explores Gliddon’s life writing not only as a case study of an individual woman’s desires and aspiration for societal reform, she also creates a unique tool exemplifying how social research can become a work of narrative illustration in itself.

What happens when the assumptions and practices of museum curators and art educators intersect with the assumptions and practices of publishing for children?This study explores how over three hundred children’s picture books, most of them published in the last three decades in English, introduce children to art and art museums. It considers how the books emerge from and relate to a range of theories and assumptions about childhood and childhood development, children’s literature and culture, illustration, visual art, museology, and art education. As well as examining how these theories and assumptions influence what picture books teach young readers about visiting museums and about how to look at and think about art, it examines which artists and artworks appear most often in picture books and offers a survey of different kinds of art-related picture books: ones that claim to be purely informational, ones that make looking at art a game or a puzzle, ones in which children visit art museums, and many more. Since the books all include reproductions of or allusions to museum artworks, the study also considers the problems illustrators face in depicting museum artworks in illustrations in a different style.

Illustrated sheet music was one of the most democratic forms of visual imagery in the U.S., owned by millions of Americans wooed by compelling lithographic covers, who displayed and performed compositions on home pianos.Advancements in printing technologies in the 19th century, together with an emergent commercial system that facilitated the publication and broad distribution of popular music, led to a surge of elaborately illustrated sheet music. This book features essays by cutting-edge scholars who analyze the remarkable images that persuaded U.S. citizens to purchase mass-produced compositions for both personal and social pleasure. With some songs selling millions of copies as printed musical scores, music publishers commissioned artists to draw every conceivable subject as promotional illustrations, including genre scenes, portraits, political and historical events, sentimental allegories, flowers, landscapes, commercial buildings, and maritime views.As ubiquitous and democratic material culture, this imagery affected ordinary people in far greater ways than unique objects, like paintings and sculpture, possibly could. The pictures, many in saturated color with bold graphics, still intrigue, amaze, and amuse viewers today with their originality, skill, and content.Rooted in visual analysis, topics in this collection include perennially significant themes: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, politics, war, patriotism, propaganda, religion, transportation, regional centers of production, technology, Reconstruction, romance, and comedy, as well as bodies of work by specific illustrators and lithographic firms. In recognizing the role that individuals have played in preserving these remarkable objects, it also features interviews with enthusiasts who own two of the largest private collections of sheet music in the U.S.

What happens when the assumptions and practices of museum curators and art educators intersect with the assumptions and practices of publishing for children?This study explores how over three hundred children’s picture books, most of them published in the last three decades in English, introduce children to art and art museums. It considers how the books emerge from and relate to a range of theories and assumptions about childhood and childhood development, children’s literature and culture, illustration, visual art, museology, and art education. As well as examining how these theories and assumptions influence what picture books teach young readers about visiting museums and about how to look at and think about art, it examines which artists and artworks appear most often in picture books and offers a survey of different kinds of art-related picture books: ones that claim to be purely informational, ones that make looking at art a game or a puzzle, ones in which children visit art museums, and many more. Since the books all include reproductions of or allusions to museum artworks, the study also considers the problems illustrators face in depicting museum artworks in illustrations in a different style.

The Women’s Wood-Engraving Revival focuses on the lives and work of women illustrators who were instrumental in an artistic revival of wood-engraving as a book illustration technique.As a reaction to the mass-produced engravings churned out by anonymous engravers in the mid-nineteenth century, the revival sought to recapture the perceived authenticity and artistic superiority of wood engraving’s earliest instantiation, in which the artist and engraver were the same person.While bound up with the limitations of the gendered legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the remnants of the Victorian era, the Wood Engraving Revival afforded women new opportunities to develop as professional artists and illustrators. Wood-engraving as a technique required few tools and was specifically suited to the needs of women artists, who required autonomy over their workspaces. Lacking independent wealth, all four women profiled in this book used wood-engraving for book and periodical publishers as a means of supporting themselves) and building professional reputationsCovering the work of Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton and Joan Hassall, the book brings scholarly attention to the work of women illustrators, whose impact on the material text went beyond images to include many facets of print culture that appealed to a growing middle-class audience, and highlights the gender politics around book production that persist today.