Illustration, Community & Collective World-Making
The world has changed during the years I was writing this book. I started my research in 2015, after working on various commissions as an illustrator where I was asked to ‘engage with the local community’. I greatly enjoyed these projects, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the intersection of community and illustration had more to offer than these commissions allowed me to explore. I decided to pursue these questions in an academic context. I started drawing on theoretical ideas about the political and used my practice as an illustrator to initiate community-focused projects (this time without the framework of a commission) to test things out and think things through. Once I had finished that, I promptly set off on a second round pursuing these themes; this time taking in a borader range of other practitioners. This work spread itself, sometimes thickly, sometimes thinly, over a decade of my life. All the while, other things kept happening too: I became a parent. I progressed in my academic career. The world went through the Covid-19 pandemic. New global conflicts erupted, and old ones reignited with new levels of atrocious violence. Meanwhile our digital devices continued to engage us with ever greater levels of persuasiveness, devouring our attention and warping our ambitions. But as I submit this manuscript for publication, it seems to me that the question of community, and more generally the themes of kinship, belonging and human connection, are – if anything – more urgent than ever.
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Show cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Illustration, Community and the Political
2. Working with Others
3. ‘But I can’t draw!’
4. Drawing Things Together
5. World-Making
6. Tracing Expressions of Community
7. Afterlives
Conclusion: Common Grounds?
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