Louise Bell

University of Plymouth

The granddaughter-illustrator as a performing agent of postmemory

Panel: Biography

This paper examines postmemory, a concept coined by comparative literature academic Marianne Hirsch, through illustration-led research. Hirsch asks whether we can remember other people’s memories, and if so how? By what means? Through what media? How does the passage of time inﬂuence this process? And how do descendants feel they are shaped by events that preceded their birth?

Postmemory work is characterised by the desire to ﬁll in gaps (in memory, in archives) and the impossibility of this completion. Silence, absence, and emptiness are always already present and often central to postmemory. The creative practices used within my PhD are tools in an attempt to reveal a past place through a familial connection. However, this estimation will always be both authorial and perforated as the trauma of the Blitz and the insurmountable distance of time form a rupture that cannot be bridged.

Within my PhD, postmemory is enacted by the ﬁgure of the granddaughter-illustrator in the attempt to come-to-know the past through the production of practice. The act of illustration, as a dynamic mode of transmission, is used as a means of experiencing an empathic encounter and working through the emotional and psychological complexities of a previous familial generation. Creative practice is made with, or in response to, family and archival photographs as empathic explication. I demonstrate how drawing can be used as a means of slowing time to unfold a feeling of recognition experienced in the examination of a photograph of a tram conductor.

Louise is an artist-academic based in the South West. Completed in 2023, her AHRC-funded practice-led PhD positions illustration practice as a process-driven act capable of creatively articulating philosopher Edith Stein’s philosophy of empathy. Louise’s hybrid creative practice includes image-making, object-making, writing, walking, and curation. Her methodology attempts to come-to-know the experience of an absent other through empathic encounters with objects, images, and cityscape. Driven by embodiment, experimentation, and feminist examination, she negotiates absences and partial knowing in response to the experience of being ‘in’ place.