'Re-': Methods of Illustrative Practice in Heritage

This paper explores the rematerialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. It will discuss concepts fundamental to the illustrator; voice and positionality encountered through the process of investigating people-place relationships and the function of creative artefacts in heritage.

The making of creative artefacts through the exploration of archival material and experimental fieldwork is an important investigative process and engagement strategy in the authors respective illustrative practices. This manifestation of subject matter through material storytelling involves a complex process of gathering, negotiating and interpreting and the authors here are concerned not only with illustrative practice as a form of communication but as a discipline defined by active exploration and knowledge generation. This approach aligns with David Harvey’s description of heritage as a ‘process’ (2010, p. 320) that is not inert and it takes place in the present (Turnbridge and Ashworth, 1995, p. 6), ‘people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate it and contest it (…) it is part of the way identities are created' (Bender, 1993, p. 3). It is an action.

The authors will discuss their own practices to unpick their role in the heritage process; a study of the historical wetland site of a deserted medieval village in East Sussex and of historical people (foundling children) at the Foundling Museum. In the analysis of their process, illustration can be framed as a: re-turn, re-visit, re-imagine, re-voice, re-assemble, re-presentation, re-enactment.

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