Illustration as an announcement of a world

Illustration is often casually assumed to be a representational practice, where ‘something out there’ is represented, i.e. shown again, in visual form. The prefix ‘re-’ in ‘representation’ suggests that something exists prior to its pictorial rendering. With reference to a project I worked on as an illustrator with a group of older feminists who had come together to record their memories of their involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement, I use this article to propose an alternative possibility for illustration. Rather than considering illustration as representational, I submit that illustration in the process of its creation can produce the reality it refers to. It can therefore be understood as a form of performative knowledge production. In this piece I draw on my project with the feminist group and interweave this with Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on community, Rosalind Krauss’s reflections on indexicality and Jacques Derrida’s essay on the nature of declarations.