How can illustrators ‘give voice’ to people and communities? How do heritage practitioners utilise the practice of illustration? How is the process of heritage-making practised by illustrators around the world?
How can illustrators ‘give voice’ to people and communities? How do heritage practitioners utilise the practice of illustration? How is the process of heritage-making practised by illustrators around the world?

Illustration & Heritage: Sharing Histories to Draw Out Futures

14th International Illustration Research Symposium

The November 2024 symposium explored the role illustration plays in cultural heritage. The forthcoming volume of the Journal of Illustration, presented in two issues, will respond to and build on ideas presented and discussed, and present new perspectives on illustration and heritage from leading thinkers.

How can we practise heritage-making with or through illustration?

In November 2024, the Illustration Programme at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL), hosted the 14th International Illustration Research Symposium, Illustration & Heritage: Sharing Histories to Draw Out Futures. The symposium, programmed by Rachel Emily Taylor, explored active processes of heritage-making through digital, institutional, and communal archives and collections, illustrative and co-illustrative methodologies, the making and giving of a ‘voice’, understanding and communicating artefacts, and looking at architecture as a historical material, among other practices.

The symposium was held at UAL’s Chelsea College of Arts and included panels, papers, and posters by practitioners and researchers from the fields of illustration, heritage, architecture, anthropology, and more. It considered principles including inheritance, displacement, collective memory, subjectivity, and plurality. How do contemporary illustrators participate in historical narratives and give voice to people and communities — remembered, obscured, and imagined — through their work?

During the symposium a variety of potentials for the role(s) and definition(s) of illustration and heritage were considered. Here is a non-exhaustive list of ideas shared:

Illustration is an act of illuminating, but light also casts a shadow and obscures or ignores other elements.

Illustration as a visual listener

Illustration as a sympathetic process with other disciplines

Illustration as language

And heritage, in the context of illustration?

Heritage as a process

Heritage as a story

Heritage as fragmentary, made up of different perspectives

The 14th Illustration Research Symposium included keynotes from Dan Hicks, curator and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Yeni Kim, illustrator and Associate Professor at Hongik University, and Chris Lee, graphic designer and Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute.

The symposium was curated in response to Illustration and Heritage, by Rachel Emily Taylor, published in 2024 by Bloomsbury Press. It was organised in partnership with Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, the Association of Illustrators, and Illustration Educators.