“Illustration happens when words are not enough and memory fails.”
- Chris Glynn

Illustration informs, reminds, enlightens and educates through humour, story, pathos, metaphor and allegory. It is a discipline re-discovering its core and finding new form and purpose.

Illustration Research has been established as a new catalyst and crucible of ideas at the forefront of illustration enquiry and exploration.

Illustration Research is based in Cardiff alongside the Cardiff School of Art & Design (UWIC) Illustration programme, looking outwards to international partners and audiences. It has online presence but celebrates the power and poignancy of live engagement and the illustrated artefact.

The aims of Illustration Research:

• Expanding and refining ideas about illustration’s purposes and reach, as a practice and as a discipline engaging with rhetoric, poetics, ethics and justice;
• Enlivening the importance of images, their impact on personal, social and economic development. Illustration has a broad output, many different homes, and has often been trapped in self-reflective and overlooked places;
• Wielding the power of illustration within research, turning practice away from pastiche, the literal, and fixation with style: propelling minds towards enlightenment and delight;
• Enabling all to join in, traversing through illustration to the wonders, horrors, nuances, and plights of the world;

Instigators:

Chris Glynn, illustrator and animation designer, set up the BA (Hons) Illustration programme at CSAD, now in its fourth year. A music and drama graduate, his interests lie in visual humour, rhetoric and memory, and in illustration as mask.

‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ Oscar Wilde

Amelia Johnstone lectures in Illustration at CSAD and led our first symposium, Shadow Play: Alchemy, Redolence and Enchantment in November 2010. Amelia is currently exploring morality through religion and folklore. Her interests lie in fairy tale, fable and growing, in the human as imaginer inspiring a better existence. She delights in theatre, in books and paper, and has a horror of social networking, of the culture that consumes itself. Her current practice hopes to enable the periscoped perspective, within teaching and storytelling and through understanding the significance of interior monologue and illustration’s ventriloquistic abilities.

“Remember, there is a materiality to symbols and a materiality to imaginative life which should be taken quite seriously.” Angela Carter

Our next event:

‘Little Door’ Symposium: Re-Enchantment of the Image
Oxford, Autumn 2011/Spring 2012 (tbc)
For further details please contact cglynn[a]uwic.ac.uk

We take people in!

Join us as an instigator, friend or research contributor. 
 Please write to us at:
Illustration Research, Cardiff School of Art & Design, UWIC, Western Avenue, Llandaff, Cardiff CF5 2YB, Wales, UK or email illustration[a]uwic.ac.uk