Drawn together: illustration, community and collective world-making

How does illustration bring to light the concerns, interests and challenges of (a) community? Can illustration help us think about the conditions of sociality more generally? And how do participatory project-structures, one of the key methods used in this research, impact on the practice of illustration? This practice-led PhD argues that collaborative illustration projects can create the possibility for individuals to encounter one another in an expression of community. In carefully considered participatory project-structures illustrations that refer to joint matters of concern can act as catalysts for an encounter, focal points for the duration of the interaction and as its record thereafter.

Three discrete illustration projects were undertaken as part of this research. For each one of them I collaborated with a group or organisation in London, inviting participants to contribute to a collaborative illustration that emerged through the project: Walking the Elephant was conducted with the local community in and around the now defunct Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre; Write Women into History emerged from my collaboration with a writing-group of older feminists; and Cracks in the Pavement is the result of a walking and collaborative mapping project during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’.

Drawing on 20th century European philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy whose work discusses question of worldmaking, sociality, relationality and the political – this PhD interweaves my collaborative illustration practice with philosophy in order to expose and delineate aspects of our social co-existence. Illustration, in the form of co-created visual documents, presents itself as the space where we can reconsider, record and reflect on the relations that occur in our everyday experience of community and practices of collective world-making.