Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca, 2018 ), theory (Male, 2017), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found until The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). The History of Illustration was published recently (Doyle, Grove, & Sherman, 2018).
The research topic developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation.
Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, will interact democratically on a common humanist themes in order to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. Projects developed should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consists of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolds in the symbiosis of these elements. The planned output is the investigation of illustration across media and materials.