Amelia Huw Morgan
Cardiff School of Art & Design
A charabanc to Disneyland? In fear of monoculture: Wonder, participation, memories and the ‘close third person’ - towards ventriloqual experiences in heritage and inherited contexts.
Panel: Voice
‘Phenomenology calls us to wonder, reflect, and draw nearer to joy, love, loss, contact, care, and all manner of deeply human meanings. It grants inceptual understandings of the nature of being and becoming human in our increasingly commercial, distracted, and conflicted world.’ (Adams & Van Manen 2017)
‘Life imitates art’ (Wilde 1891), how we see in our everyday, live in and perceive the world. Through this paper I will reveal the illustrator’s ‘willingness to meet what is utterly strange in what is most familiar’ (Adams & Van Manen 2017). Screens have allowed more singularly visual than visceral experiences risking the severing of our senses.
We ‘must grasp the image initially with a look, but then caress the image with a gaze which reveals its true significance’ (Spencer-Hall 2017)
In 2024 our ways of seeing (Berger 1972) have transformed from a life with objects in the physical world, to digital expanses of experience - which often lack a direct physical or visceral quality.
To give focus in this paper and to build on my hypothesis of the phenomenological position for illustration in heritage, I will examine illustration’s ventriloqual powers to voice the experiences of children in the lead up to and during the 2024 Eisteddfod1 in Pontypridd. Drawing upon my work with Ysgol Evan James using making, drawing, performance, puppetry, and storytelling as a mode towards cultural memory building. Our early experiences ‘are in the bones of us’ (Child 2021), becoming the inheritance of our lives as we live them forming our imaginations. This paper is about realising the value of visual experiences beyond what-we-see and not on-their-own, but in their relational context to us and our understanding of who we are as humans. from Cardiff School of Art & Design and pupils from Ysgol Evan James for the Eisteddfod to build on their cultural memory recognising the importance of our childhood experiences on our values and who we become. I will use the ‘close third person’ to observe build and translate the childrens’ cultural memories with particular focus on the ventriloqual thought process imbued, promoting this for illustration with impact.
Amelia is an Illustrator and Senior lecturer in Illustration at Cardiff School of Art & Design teaching into the undergraduate scheme and leading the MA Pathway in Illustration & Animation. Amelia’s work and teaching focus on the action of the illustrated image in the world in hope of ‘The Participant Viewer’. Amelia is fascinated in exploring how images speak, teach lessons and forewarn. Amelia’s work is colourful, sometimes frightening, bold and immediate; she describes her process as going into ‘a sort of trance of making’ only to be flung out by some worldly interruption from her imaginative dreamscape.