Journal of Illustration - Current Issue

A brief overview of themes and content of the second Special Issue of the Journal of Illustration on ‘Illuminating the Non-Representable’, a multi-year series led by Hilde Kramer, comprising symposia, projects and articles exploring how illustration intersects with difficult, nebulous and traumatic subject matter. Articles and features touch upon Holocaust memorialization, memory, object illustration, participatory research, traditional arts, pain and the body.

Review of: Materiality, Space and Embodiment: Transformative Illustration and Entanglements with the Other, Istanbul, Türkiye, 15–17 October 2021

‘Fluid, not Frozen’ delves into the relationship between intangible memory and its material form, as experienced through collaborative projects with artists from Kutch and Rajasthan, India. These artists employ the mediums of cloth and wood, respectively, to manifest and embed their memories in tangible forms such as embroidery and the kaavad shrine. The communities’ artworks (or artistic traditions) serve as living examples of the dynamic, evolving nature of memory and material, with cloth and wood echoing the malleability and resilience of memory. This article shares the insights that emerged from the collaboration between the artists and the filmmaker–author with regard to the fluidity and transformation of memory and material.

Why is that which is revered or feared is given a form? Is it because fear of the unknowable and invisible can seem like an abyss, and manifesting it to form perhaps makes it finite? Or perhaps it brings some solace and gives courage to encounter it? Artists Venkat Shyam from Madhya Pradesh and Anil Vangad from Maharashtra, India, attempt to give a form to fear of the corona virus and perhaps anger to make peace with their observations.

This article focuses on the project If This Is a Human Being, which explores innovative methods for Holocaust education using illustration-based methods, and tactile and interactive approaches to learning and teaching history. We developed three workshops for university students investigating Norwegian-Jewish micro-histories during the Second World War, and our findings indicate that the methods fostered engagement, concentration and a sense of accountability towards the historical Other. The project aimed to supplement existing Holocaust education by providing new tools and techniques to address challenging subjects like the Holocaust in an educational setting, and to create pedagogical environments that promote historical thinking and responsibility, using a design-based research approach to develop and refine these educational strategies.

This portfolio presents works by Imi Maufe and Hilde Kramer. Both projects were part of the multi-year Illuminating the Non-Representable artistic research project, led by Kramer, University of Bergen. The filmed performance, Book-Object-Object-Knowledge, explored the concept of the semiophor (a semiotic shift by recontextualization). Book of Remembrance, a performative artist book, challenged how illustration can represent stories of profound human suffering. It focused on a specific historic event where over fifteen thousand people were deported to their deaths, between 5 and 12 September 1942. Works include a large glass-cased book and performances with its pages in public, a film and an exhibition that included letterpress pamphlets and object illustrations.

Pain can be isolating: the pain of others is hard to imagine. This difficulty can become more significant still when attempting to bear witness to the pain of groups deemed different, lesser or other, such as non-human animals. Exploring frameworks for pain which emphasize its relational and connective qualities, especially across species borders, as well as considering activism and illustration alongside each other as practices in which bodies are used to advocate for others, how might the application of queer and ecofeminist lenses to these disciplines reveal their affinities? This article experiments with the terms TRANSLATION, AMPLIFICATION and REFRACTION to describe modes of illustrative activism which implicate the body. Through such modes of creative and corporeal empathy, what can be imagined, reached for, or described of a non-human being’s suffering?

‘What does it mean when the ghosts of our past refuse to leave?’ Norwegian illustrator Theodor Kittelsen’s book, Svartedauen ([1901] 2011) utilizes pictured poetry, or poetry written in conjunction with illustrated elements, to tell a mythologized version of the story of the Black Death, an illness that claimed approximately 60 per cent of the Norwegian population in the fourteenth century. Curiously, his depictions of icy fjords and dark forests contain elements contemporary with Kittelsen’s life, implying that the mythological characters and ghosts of the fourteenth century still inhabit his homeland. I argue that the book represents the temporal rupture felt by Norwegians at the end of the nineteenth century, caused by extreme societal changes driven by their fight for independence and rapid industrialization. Using a ‘hauntological’ lens developed by Jacques Derrida, this article explores how Kittelsen’s landscapes of anachronism are displayed both in the book’s motifs and its medium.

This short text highlights how ET Russian reshapes traditional illustration by weaving together multisensory techniques to create accessible, immersive narratives. Grounded in disability justice and queer identity, Russian’s work goes beyond visual art, blending performance, sound, texture and tactile elements. This approach invites underrepresented communities, especially disabled and LGBTQ+ individuals, into the storytelling process. By pushing the boundaries of accessibility and identity, Russian’s art challenges viewers’ perceptions and demonstrates how multisensory storytelling can evoke empathy and drive change within the field of illustration.

Review of: Illustration and Heritage, Rachel Emily Taylor (2024)

London: Bloomsbury, 192 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35029-417-2, h/bk, £58.50