Pedagogic Project

As you begin your degree at Kingston School of Art and continue on your creative journey, it is important that you continue to develop and grow confidence in your own voice as an illustrator animator. Your voice is unique to you and will relates to the subjects and themes you want to make work about, the people you wish to make work for, and the processes and visual languages that you’ll use to express yourself and communicate your ideas. These themes might come through your own unique backgrounds; cultural and social heritage, experienced and understood both as individuals but also as part of a broader collective society.

Throughout this year, you will work both independently and collaboratively as part of a cultural community. This project asks you to consider your identity from the perspective of both the individual and the collective. You will be introduced to working methods that will support the development of your ideas, values and voice to harness the collective energy of our studio community as a declaration of who we are.

Brief

Over the course of the next three weeks, you will be introduced to a range of collaborative methods for illustration animation and be asked to use these to investigate and visualise identities that relates to and are significant for you.

Through this project, you will collect and interrogate your individual interests, values and references as a method of research, before widening the scope to find a commonality between you and your group.  Each group will work together to expand on this common ground to develop a reproducible, collaborative zine and risograph poster that offers a visual snap-shot of who we are, our shared values and identity/ies at this point.

Our intention is to have an exhibition and zine fayre in the main entrance at Knights Park to declare our identity and share our work with the wider community at KSA as a statement of intent that communicates our values, interests and beliefs as a collective. 

‘Who Are We’ is a collaborative group project that uses a shared theme of commonality between each group as a starting point for research, experimentation and communication.

Laura Copsey is an experimental illustrator from East Anglia. Her way of working is interdisciplinary and collaborative, blurring with her background as a therapist and musician. Laura is interested in the grey area between what is real and imagined, between truth and lies – gaps which often shed light on what a particular story can reveal about the present. Laura uses objects, cameraless photography, moving image, collage and sound to explore traces of human endeavour from history, within heritage locations, traditional trades or museum collections. She also organises expeditions, most recently with Sail Britain on the theme of Islandness. Laura teaches level 4 on BA illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art.

Instagram: @laurachops
Website: www.lauracopseyart.com

Student Dissertation extract

When I was growing up, every teen media seemed to be telling me that when I became a teenage girl, I will “become more girly, less childish and fall in love with a boy”, so that was what I believed. But as I got older, none of that happened. Indeed, “I will like boys” gradually became “I might” and then into “I don’t”. It seems like I have fallen off the trajectory of my own growth. So, what has happened to my growth? Where has it gone? What happens to the other girls like me? Do we ever grow up? In this essay, I will explore the representation of adolescent girls ‘alternative ways of growing in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s comic This One Summer (2014) and Céline Sciamma’s film Water lilies (2007). To do so, I will apply the framework sideways growth. It is rooted in queer theory, a deconstructive strategy that aims to denaturalise¹ heteronormative presumptions of different social issues’ (Sullivan 2003).

Sideways growth specifically aims to denaturalise the Western normative beliefs of growth. It identifies what is considered as normative growth, and reframes what is being left behind as equally valid growth. Although the concept was first proposed by Stockton in 2009, it was not until 2021 that Malewski’s study has tried to create its working definition. Therefore, in this essay, I would like to adapt and apply this new framework into my two case studies to explore its potential. My first case study is This One Summer (2014), a 319-page graphic novel written by the Canadian illustrator Jillian Tamaki and writer Mariko Tamaki.

It is a coming-of-age story about Rose, an early adolescent girl, who observes the “adult world” around her. My second case study is Water lilies (2007), an 85-minute film by the French director Céline Sciamma. It is also a coming-of-age story, but with three slightly older 15-year-old protagonists: Marie (Pauline Acquart), Floriane (Adèle Haenel) and Anne (Louise Blachère). It focuses more on the desire and relationship amongst teenagers. Both works are small character studies: they have a slow pace and follow mainly one character’s subjectivity within a short span of time in just one location. They put the representation of adolescent girls’ experience into the centre and highlight the less obvious, but still important, progress of growth. Despite having different mediums, geographical settings, and focuses, I believe they depict adolescent girls’ alternative growth in similar ways. I first connected the two works together because both received similar criticisms from mainstream review websites Rotten Tomato and IMDB, regarding a lack of “character development”. Yet, it was the characters’ growth that most charmed me, though I could not articulate why: Is there really a lack of “character development”? How do the works represent the growth of their adolescent girls’ protagonists? Why are their growths not being recognised? Chapter 1 establishes the framework of sideways growth through examining my key texts. I will also relate the framework to female adolescence or girlhood. Chapter 2 analyses the narration style and layout in This One Summer to understand how it develops one adolescent girl’s sideways growth by focusing on her inner thoughts and past experience in upwards growth.

Chapter 3 explores how metaphors and cinematography in the film Water Lilies help represent three girls indifferent stages in their adolescence, navigating through their current struggles within the upwards growth and their subsequent sideways development. My study is important because as Trites (2014, p.147) argued, “(w)e replicate scripts of growth to organize our own experiences of growth, to organize our understanding of other people’s growth.” Media representations of girls influence how the general public and the girls themselves conceptualise their growth, just like how I did in the past. When only upwards growth is presented as the correct way to grow for girls, it runs into what Adichie (2009, 9:31) called, “the danger of a single story”, an incomplete story that “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that is what they become”.I believe this study could help identifying the applicability of the new framework sideways growth and raise awareness of the ideology behind it.

…

Conclusion

My dissertation explores how This One Summer and Water Lilies represent adolescent girls’ growth. In This One Summer, by going into one girl’s mind to show her past lingering thoughts; in Water Lilies, by navigating three girls’ current struggles. By being small-scale, both delve into the characters’ subjectivity in details, creating sympathetic representations of the struggles of growth in adolescent girls. Both of them framed the struggles as a consequence of the grand narrative, and create resolutions by letting the characters grow sideways. In doing so, they resist the ‘danger of a single story’. They tell stories that rejects the normative way of growth and embraces the alternative, and hence, reveal that there was never a single correct way to grow. My study suggests that Malewski’s (2021) framework “sideways growth” is applicable in identifying and analysing the representation of adolescent girls’ alternative growth. However, I am aware that the new framework is based on the Western normative belief of growth. Because of this, I have limited my analysis to representation of white, able-bodied girls living in western countries to keep it simple. Nevertheless, as a Hong Kong girl who grew up with Western teen media, I still find the ideology behind this framework resonating with my own experience of growth. I believe ‘sideways growth’ can be adapted and applied to representations of growth of the disabled, other races and cultures, and perhaps could have an even stronger impact on questioning our way of theorising growth. I can conclude there is growth in Rose, in Floriane, in Anne, in Marie, and in me or any other girls like us. It is just obscured by the grand narrative of upwards growth and sideways growth could reveal them again. It helps us rethink what is valuable in the experience of growth, and encourages us to look at the uncertain, the illegible, the childish, the failed, and the sideways.

What Was Not Taught In My Sex-Ed
(A project that ‘re-presents’ the themes of the dissertation research)

14x20cm, 28pp, Ball pen and highlighter, digitally printed

A comic that comments on my sex education in a Hong Kong Catholic girl school as a queer girl. Using the format of doodles on a homework book, it focuses on using humour to discuss taboo subjects and appropriating daily visual languages.

1. denaturalise is derived from the term naturalise, meaning the process of ‘transmuting what is essentially cultural (historical, constructed and motivated) into something which it materializes as natural (transhistorical, innocent and factual)’ (Hall, 1997, p.181-182, emphasis in the original). Denaturalise means ‘the undoing of the process of naturalisation.

PhD Research Project

Traditional approaches to reportage illustration in the UK are defined by what we can see. Rather than the classification of subject matter as visible or invisible, this thesis explores a scape ‘describing a wide view of a particular type’ ² of visibility relating to the geographic, cultural, and historic appearances of the deserted medieval village of Northeye. Forming part of the Ramsar wetland Pevensey Levels, East Sussex, this transformative landscape has become a vehicle to critically respond to Embury and Minichiello’s definition of the reportage illustrator as ‘a particular kind of visual journalist, capturing the dynamics of unfolding events through their artwork. Reportage combines sketching the appearance of the scene as well as striving to understand and communicate a story through visual language.’³

Positioning illustrative documentary as interpretive through multi method approaches to visual inquiry, this response is informed by fields of thinking originating from archaeology, cultural geography, and heritage studies. By conducting an expanded practical exploration of time, matter, and movement in relation to Northeye, the intersection of illustration and adjacent humanity disciplines is formalised in this thesis as a key contribution to knowledge in place research. It is described here as an area of hybrid practice ‘graphic humanities’ and consolidates a methodology for image making as both knowledge generation and communication.

The thesis and resulting creative artefacts intend to bring illustration research into discourses surrounding heritage, identity, and place engagement in culturally underserved locations. By offering diverse ways of visualising the world, illustrators can define a distinct function in research environments and bring much needed knowledge and debate to the challenges, ethics, and impact of visual representation across professional, pedagogic, and public territories.

NORTHEYE
DMV*

* Deserted Medieval Village

Once belonging to an archipelago on the southeast coast of England, Northeye is scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act, and forms part of the Ramsar listed wetland Pevensey Levels. The island was part of a network of salt extraction sites across Pevensey Levels and became a hub for surrounding trade and industry as a limb of the Cinque Port of Hastings. A chapel once stood on the highest point of the island. 

Wetlands are transformative. Physical markers and shifting boundaries between land and sea can dramatically change the location of a site, bringing its very existence into question. Following a series of storms in the thirteenth century devastating the coastline, the settlement was deserted and has since served as pastoral agricultural land. Historic documentation on Northeye is fragmented; lost excavation reports, inconclusive geoarchaeological data and conflicting archival records mirror its physically elusive state.  The extent and reach of the deserted medieval village is unknown and the site currently exists as earthworks. A number of public footpaths lead to the monument, several of which are at risk of disappearing. 

The creative artefacts collated in this repository explore hidden, lost and abandoned narratives at the site, bringing together fieldwork and archival research undertaken between 2015-2020. These include an installation of research in progress at Bexhill Museum, Bexhill-on-Sea, an audio-visual documentary screened at Bexhill Museum, the Herbert Read Galley, Canterbury, and the Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah, alongside an interactive assemblage of visual and textual fieldwork. Navigate the pins to reveal different elements of Northeye’s story. 

This project is generously supported by Bexhill Museum and the London Doctoral Design Centre. It forms part of a doctoral research investigation undertaken by Leah Fusco at Kingston School of Art, titled ‘Illustrating Northeye: An Exploration of Time, Matter, and Movement at a Historic Wetland Site’. 

Leah Fusco Artist in Residence at Bexhill Museum

28 January – 15 December 2019

Northeye is a deserted medieval village in East Sussex, once an island on the southeast coast of England and a limb of the Cinque Port of Hastings. Scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar), the site now exists as reclaimed agricultural marshland. Alongside physical changes in the landscape, documentation of Northeye is fragmented through lost reports, inconclusive data and conflicting records. The extent and reach of the site is currently unknown, with the remnants visible as a series of shallow earthworks.

Through drawing, painting, animation and mapping, Leah has responded to Northeye on location, often using processes and materials orginating from the site itself. She has spent time with documents and artefacts at Bexhill Museum to unearth stories from the archive and to explore evidence of the deserted village. Past and present viewpoints are brought together, from archaeologists, farmers and water engineers to cartographers, walkers and livestock currently inhabiting the landscape, in a multilayered telling of Northeye’s story.

During her time at the museum, Leah will create a large-scale map with chalk collected from the site to draw the shifting coastline, reflecting over a thousand years of geographic change. Exploring the theme of reclaimation, the exhibition looks at the role of creative practice in bringing hidden, lost and abandoned places into public knowledge.

Northeye (2019)

Northeye is a single screen documentary responding to the deserted medieval village of Northeye. A script developed from archival research, collected accounts, personal experience and historic and geoarchaeological material is used to narrate a visual exploration of the site.

Northeye has been screened at Bexhill Museum, Bexhill-on-Sea,  Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury and the Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah.

1. Scape (n.d.). Available at www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/scape [Accessed: 22 March 2021]
2. Embury, G. and Minichiello, M. (2018), Reportage illustration: visual journalism. London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

To be transgender is to feel, at some level, a disharmony between the gender you were assigned at birth and your innate gender identity. Trans comes from the Latin meaning ‘across’, so one’s gender identity is across from the one assigned at birth. Logically it’s opposite Latin term ‘cis’ means ‘within’, so the term cisgender is now commonly used to denote anyone who is not transgender and therefore feels that their gender identity matches the one they were assigned at birth. The word ‘trans’ alone is also an umbrella term for all gender non-conforming identities such as transfeminine, non-binary, agender, genderfluid and so on. I want to acknowledge that much of this language is new and not common knowledge; the necessity to define ‘trans’ demonstrates this. This language may also become outdated in the future just as some of the terms previously used within trans communities have and I accept that as part of the cycle of challenging the systems in place. I would also like to acknowledge my position as the author, that I am a white middle-class transfeminine non-binary person and although this grants me first-hand experience of living whilst transgender I also benefit from the privileges of being white and middle class in a system built to keep these classes dominant. My practice as an illustrator and animator revolve around queer and trans identities and I have a passion for shows that represent these issues as they fill me with joy and reassurance that I cannot always give myself. In order to avoid delving into reportage I shall from hereon use evidence in the form of studies, articles, and diaries to further illustrate and consolidate trans experiences alongside evaluations of fictional animated characters to explore how they facilitate new understandings of gender identity.

Authors Note:

I made this book because I was getting increasingly frustrated by transgender depictions in film – or lack thereof – and felt I had no place or people to share it with. I searched for material around the subject with the tools I had: the internet & a library. First, I found a lot of heavy academic writing that was insightful but not personal (and unsurprisingly not very accessible), then I found online blogs who dropped in humanising anecdotes alongside their analysis but still floated around singularly. Thirdly I sought out and met transgender groups – something that brought so much more joy than I could imagine – but is yet to get into the long form discussion of film that I was itching to engage with.

All of these brought me a wealth of information, the biggest part of which is the realisation that there is still so much I have yet to see/hear/read/learn. Yet I didn’t feel satiated. It was too fragmented, and given the opportunity of a final year project at university I decided to try and consolidate the lot into… something?

Overwhelmed by options I returned to my favourite piece of trans literature ever: Fucking Trans Women Issue #0 by Mira Bellwether (she/her).

A zine that encourages readers to DIY publications and share their own knowledge to add to the historically persecuted literature of transgender and gender diverse people. So I did. There is so much more I wish to say but restraints of this world and this corporeal body require temporary endings, so here is the first edition of my experience with Transgender Cinema.

Pedagogic Project

I’d love to see young women creating illustrations of grime or drill MCs but the likelihood is that we’ll keep seeing the same images and reading the same narratives. Much of the most interesting and powerful culture in the UK is made by high-melanin or queer people who experience at least some degree of marginalisation because of skin tone or sexuality. Many of our writers and photographers – and almost all of our editors – come from nuclear low-melanin families, many of whom can afford private education. It matters to have the right person telling the right story, at least some of the time.

Why Documenting Your Culture Is An Act Of Resistance, by Emma Warren

I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talk), by Chimamanda Adichie

Context

As you enter the third year many of your will be thinking about how you find an individual or authentic voice/visual language as an illustrator animator. Telling stories is fundamental to illustration animation practice and this project asks you use storytelling as a way of finding your voice. Many stories make up who you are, but what stories do you choose to tell? In her highly influential TED talk, Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice – and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Individual illustration animation practices can be utilised to document, record and tell stories about, those people, objects and locations we can see as well as communicate knowledge and experiences that are intangible. Preserving a cultural and its history and/or traditions can be seen as a radical act – not only in the socio-political sense but radical in the sense of being able to affect the fundamental nature of something. As visual practitioners we should consider the power we hold and the legacy of our work – what is its purpose? Who does it support or represent? What does this mean for future generations?

Brief

Use your practice to illustrate what you recognise as an example of cultural heritage that relates to your own personal everyday experience, biography or lineage. Tell a story about an aspect of your personal cultural heritage that might otherwise be difficult to access or comprehend to those outside of the communities you belong to. Your outcome should strive to make your personal knowledge and experience accessible to others and provoke a more empathic understanding from your audience. Begin by considering the various communities you belong to (family, friends, professional (work places), interest groups, clubs, social circles, etc.) and their associated histories, habits and social practices. It may be helpful to identify any social phenomenon’s that are informal, unrecorded or unknown to those outside these groups.

To ‘Illustrate’ should be understood as the fullest use of your practice to interrogate and describe chose story. You can use any method/s to conduct your exploration and your outputs can take on any form. As part of your process you may wish to conduct interviews, audio-visual recordings, site / location visits or field work etc. Always keep in mind what are the most appropriate ways to investigate and capture your cultural with sensitivity and respect to the subject matter, the communities involved and the audience to whom you communicate.

two examples of outcomes:

A publication that explores how language forms identity, particularly the feelings experiences by those of dual heritage who don’t learn to speak the language of their parents.

A zine about the unspoken rules of South Koreans in everyday life.
105 x 148 mm, one colour risoprint.

Rachel Gannon is Associate Professor and Head of Department for Illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art.

Research Project

During summer 2021 Laura Copsey and Philip Crewe were illustrators in residence for the first Engine House Residency, commissioned by the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration (formerly House of Illustration). The outcomes, New River Folk Museum and the New River: Immersions exhibitions were installed at the New River Head site during Open House London and London Design Festival 2022.

Copsey and Crewe collaborated to explore the heritage of the New River, with focus on historic trades and superstitions associated with water in the era of the New Rivers construction (1604–1613). Their intention was to discover the names and occupations of working class trades people, often omitted from the New Rivers official history, people who had once either worked for the New River Company or would have had occupations affected by it.

Their New River Folk became characters, each with a collection of storied objects, tools and ephemera presented as a fictional museum, capable of telling stories of their working lives and beliefs. Being from marginalized historical groups documentation was scarce –fragments, gaps and unknowing. As storytellers, this grey area between what si real and imagined is the territory in which Copsey and Crewe’s work sits, where curiousity and not-knowing becomes a fertile site for creativity.

The collections of the New River Folk, Mary Woolaston, Joan Starkeye and William Mollitrape are all made using traditional craft techniques and site specific process. Material was ‘excavated’ on site and repurposed and images were made directly with the site using camerealess photography, 16mm film and New River water.

As a result, the colections became para-fictional, simultaneously real and unreal. ‘Para-fiction’ is a term that describes artworks that inhabit the overlap between fact and fiction. ‘In para-fiction, real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived’ in the present with works often skilled at mimicry and therefore potentially deceptive, which in a museum context creates an obvious ethical tension. However, Copsey and Crewe aimed to offset the potential harms of para-fiction, via playful spirit and use of ‘immersive heritage’ methods with “story-led, audience and participation centred, multisensory experience, attuned to its environment,” Here the heritage is not about the past at all, but constructed ideas of how the past may serve present and speak to our contemporary interests and concerns.

More info about this project:

qbcentre.org.uk/journal/copsey-and-crewe-narrative-extraction-services
Instagram: @copseyandcrewe and @new.river.artist

About us

Philip and Laura met as students at the RCA in 2016 and share an interest in heritage, people and objects. Their work explores how time, experience, traditional craft and objects can communicate; and how careful material decisions to enhance context and sense of place. They have collaborated with @ReachOutRCA on ‘Institutional Failure’ related to the authority and (un)reliability of historical narratives; and at The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) where Philip created a layered tool kit for farming and baking, inspired by London folklore, to facilitate Laura’s portable wheatfield where she attempted to grow one loaf of bread from scratch

Laura Copsey is an experimental illustrator from East Anglia. Her way of working is interdisciplinary and collaborative, blurring with her background as a therapist and musician. Laura is interested in the grey area between what is real and imagined, between truth and lies – gaps which often shed light on what a particular story can reveal about the present. Laura uses objects, cameraless photography, moving image, collage and sound to explore traces of human endeavour from history, within heritage locations, traditional trades or museum collections. She also organises expeditions, most recently with Sail Britain on the theme of Islandness. Laura teaches level 4 on BA illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art.

Instagram: @laurachops
Website: www.lauracopseyart.com

Philip Crewe is a designer/maker/tutor from the Isle of Wight. Through his practice ‘Espergaerde’ he explores the fascinating wiggly weirdness that exists between people and things. He makes storied objects – objects that are valued for how they are made and relevant in how they are used. Philip works at Goldmiths University. He has recently completed a residency at the Museum of Cornish Life in Helston.

Instagram: @espergaerde
Website: espergaerde.com