Introduction

What are productive illustrative strategies to unearth, activate and reposition our relationship to the past? What kind of competence can illustrators bring to the task of reconstructing forgotten or otherwise absent histories? Should we even be “colouring in” the past, or might other kinds of gestures yield more nuanced results?

This third issue of Colouring In is the result of an extraordinarily rich and engaging symposium that took place on 9 December 2022 at the University of the Arts London. We are delighted to hereby publish our speakers’ compelling contributions, including invocations of iIllustration as a conjuring act, reflections on the benefits of presentism, explorations of illustrative methods for articulating non-linear time, and thoughts on grappling with illustration’s own histories of representation. Our most extensive issue to date, it seems that the past will not let us rest...