Barnaby Lickens-Richards

Falmouth University

The Alphabet Tree: Concerning image-text relations, medieval schematics and material visions.

Panel: Learning

When Saint Jerome defined a system for attributing authorship to a series of texts as matters of quality, coherence, stylistic uniformity and historical convergence, it is interesting to note an ambiguity as to whether the texts collected needed to be by the same person.

Our imagination has a tendency to turn in on itself. Its impulse is to privatize experience, plotting personal, stylistic, and conceptual terrains over which the author-illustrator takes ownership and desires to be seen. My paper explores heritage as a method for opening up and aligning the individual with a collective tradition. To embed culture within the illustrative process.

My practice became preoccupied with these matters through the relationship with my pre-verbal autistic daughter. Firstly, with less time at my disposal, outputs became secondary to embedding meaning within the process of making. I began to study historic script and through this forged a lively connection with a collective social memory. Secondly, articulating the relationship with my daughter led to an exploration of the inchoate bond between pictures and words.

Anchoring both these things is an academic interest in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts within which, to coin Michelle Brown, ‘pictures are to be read and words are to be looked at’ John Berger’s reflections on the nature of translation requiring a return to the preverbal and Tim Ingold’s work on the relationship between authorship and scribe will also be key, for the “hand that writes does not cease to draw.”

I will explore the use of ekphrasis in relation to my work also, but I especially hope to illustrate through my preoccupation with eighth century manuscripts the concept of writing as a visual practice; a process which makes visible, gives voice and offers allegiance to a historical tradition within which the maker is cradled. Finally, this desire to be part of something larger than the individual which I believe to be central to the impulse of illustration.


Barnaby Lickens-Richards is the Course Leader of MA Illustration online at Falmouth University. He developed the course and has led it for the past six years. In 2018 he received a Falmouth Excellence award for driving diversity in the workplace. Prior to this he held lecturing positions at Plymouth Art College, Stoke University and associate positions at Goldsmiths, University of Hertfordshire, University of Westminster and UAL. Before moving into education Barnaby worked as a freelance illustrator for twenty years and produced two comic books, for Blank Slate Books (UK) and TOON Books (US) respectively. He is based in London.