These past 6 months, I have been working on Live Illustration Expanded, a R&D project gratefully supported by an Arts Council DYCP grant. Information and recording of that project are available here.
It will culminate by a Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk on Friday 29th October. You can book your free ticket here to attend online or in person.
The Workshop Magazine is a zine based on the brilliant Plot Workshop Workshop, which teaches you how to design and facilitate great online workshops. The live illustrations I produced during one of their sessions have been redeveloped in this beautiful edition. In a world where most event have switched to digital, facilitators need to learn and to adapt to this new environment. This magazine is filled with tips and examples from the best in this domain.
I was very pleased to be appointed by Mothers Rise Up and Our Kids Climate to create illustrations for their campaign #OurOtherMother. The group was celebrating mums and planet earth around UK Mothers’ Day as the UK is slowly coming out of lockdown. Mothers are exhausted and so is our mother earth. Yet campaigning falls on the same shoulders and adds to the emotional/maternal load. Through these illustrations I wanted to give all mums a rest.
I recently collaborated with Parisian architecture studio Secousses and created an illustrated signage for their beautiful project La Cabane. The visual needed to reflect the collaborative and ecological aspect of the project. I created a mix of architectural illustration and scribing visual to explain the journey of each main material. Secousses wanted the signage to be engraved onto wood, which was very new for me! The illustration needed to be vector-based in order to be laser-cut by Wecut.
As all my projects at the moment this was made remotely so I am looking forward to seeing the plate in person when I will be able to travel to France again!
I was very honoured to scribe this seminar on Women’s Health and complementary therapies curated and chaired by Dr Yewande Okuleye. The event also explored the link with CBD and included talks from Kathryn Vere, Pat Duckworth and Bukola as well as beautiful and powerful spoken words from Poetess Jess. I am so grateful for this shared, safe space of knowledge and experiences. The live illustrations are now going to be turned into a comic strip incarnating and celebrating women’s health.
I am vey pleased to announce that I have teamed up with the fabulous Imwen Eke and Takita Bartlett as the collective Across the Room and that we have been selected as a recipient of the Pervasive Media Studio’s Future Themes fund for our first project: Ethno Augmenting Social Realities. We are exploring how to create multi-user tools for cultural relevance in physical and digital spaces to produce more inclusive experiences. I will look at developing an enhanced live illustration practice to expand the possibilities of virtual facilitation.
Rendez-vous to our lunchtime talk on the 30th October to find out more!
How might we enable people to flourish at work and personally during COVID? This was the provocation that started Flourishing in Medicine, a symposium that took place on the 3rd September and that I was very honoured to live illustrate. Organised by Dr Louise Younie , this virtual event gathered GPs, medical students, health consultants, pharmacists who discussed the importance of flourishing instead of resilience in their practice.
My series of live illustration performances EXQUISITE CORPSE took place in August on YouTube. You can see the three episodes on replay here.
This print is the merging on paper of the three virtual performances and incorporates QR codes leading to the replay of the performances. In my journey to develop my live illustration practice through the help of creative technologies I am interested to explore what stays after a performance, what traces of an event we can imagine to go beyond a nice visual shared on Instagram. This is a first attempt to answer the question. The print can be purchased here.
I’m pleased to introduce Exquisite Corpse, a series of three virtual live illustration performances taking place at the end of August. You can book your free ticket here.
Through this series of short live illustration performances, I want to give the audience a moment of peace and quiet, perhaps even a meditative experience. The liveness of the performance will bring people to the heart of my drawing process, triggering a range of emotions that I hope will be liberating.
Carefully curated to ambient soundscapes, EXQUISITE CORPSE invites you to a playful, quirky but relaxing experience on the last three Mondays of August:
Monday 17th August, 8-8.15 pm: HEAD
Monday 24th August, 8-8.15 pm: TORSO
Monday 31st August, 8-8.15 pm: LEGS (and reveal!)
The performances will take place on my new YouTube channel. Please subscribe, click like and share if you feel able, I am appreciative of your support!
This activity is gratefully supported by a grant from Arts Council England Emergency Respond Fund for individuals.
I was very pleased to collaborate with the Paris-based architecture practice Secousses and created this series of illustrations for a community space project in the Parisian suburbs. They wanted me to bring a cartoon twist to their interior design refurbishment of this beautiful Art Deco building. Their aim was to highlight the people and the way they could make this space their own. Thanks Secousses!
Edited 29/06/20 - 14/08/20 - 04/10/20 - 17/11/20
This isn’t just a hashtag. This isn’t a trend. This sure isn’t news. So much more needs to be done.
There’s a huge difference between being non-racist and being (actively) anti-racist. Let’s listen, educate ourselves and act.
Below are some resources that I found really helpful. Please don’t hesitate to contact me to suggest other.
Books:
Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge
The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla
White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo
Children’s books:
People, Peter Spier
All are welcome, Alexandra Penfold
M is for Melanin: a celebration of the black child, Tiffany Rose
Don’t touch my hair!, Sharee Miller
Comme un million de papillons noirs, Laura Nsafou & Barbara Brun (French)
Mixed, Arree Chung
Podcasts:
Kiffe ta race (French)
Le Tchip (French)
Extimité (French)
Databases:
I also found this collection of anti-racism resources for white people extremely helpful, especially on the parenting side.
Considering the history of the cartoon industry with racial bias and oppression, I have been doing some researches and here are some articles, tutorials and social media posts that I found helpful in my learning process on how to support racial equality with my practice (will keep adding as I keep learning):
Representation Matters! How To Respectfully Write And Draw POC And LGBTQIA Characters At NYCC, Bleeding Cool
This article on The Redline Station, where I also discovered the brilliant Kat Tsai (below)
Drawing East Asian faces, Kat Tsai
Ideas to consider when creating BIPOC characters, by Charis Jackson Barrios (Charis JB) and a lot more important information on her Instagram profile!
This article by Mel-Lion about drawing Black people
Diversity drawing by Ink Factory
Eva-Lotta Lamm has a great article on visualising inclusiveness and diversity gathering interesting resources, especially for scribing and sketchnoting
I am very grateful to Arts Council England for offering me one of their emergency grants during the health crisis. During the next few weeks I will take the time to think and research how to sustain and develop my live illustration practice. This will involve switching from analogue to digital by learning softwares such as Procreate and Tagtool. This research will lead to a series of live illustration events on my YouTube channel.
Stay tuned!
I had the privilege to be commissioned to perform remote graphic recording for South West Creative Technology Network automation workshops. Here are some extracts of the first session, looking at audiences and how their behaviours can shift because of the COVID-19 crisis.
Remote live illustration are a great alternative to the virtual meeting room during lockdown time. It helps the workshop attendees to focus and have a vivid memory of their collective event.
Following our collaborations in 2019 the Bristol-based charity Bluebell Care commissioned me to produce a series of cartoons for this year’s Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week in partnership with the Perinatal MH Partnership. This series focused on the virtual support the organisation still provides to mothers and young families during the global health crisis.
I was very honoured to take part in the #medicineonthewalls ‘Stay In’ project, piloted by Dr John Lee at the University of Bristol’s intercalated BA in Medical Humanities, in collaboration with People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and street artist Object.
“#medicineonthewalls takes Graphic Medicine to the streets. It tries to start healthcare discussions going from the ground up, and not the top down. #medicineonthewalls tries to make the kind of emotional engagement with medicine and health happen better than it often does through official channels. Taking Graphic Medicine to the streets is particularly appropriate here in Bristol, because street art is now a bit of a Bristol-fashion.”
I was asked to create a comic strip to be painted on the wall and chose to talk about motherhood and activism in lockdown. The mural was then painted by Object who only had a very limited time to reproduce the visual. I wanted to talk about the difficulty of parenting young kids during lockdown and the impact it can have on mental health. I also wanted to pass on a message that we can't let this world get back to 'normal' after this and that the anger we can feel towards our government might be an opportunity to feed our activist-self.
The visual will be soon replaced by the next 'Stay In' design.
More about the #medicineonthewalls project here. A timelapse of the mural is available here. Read the call for international participation at graphicmedicine.org. Historic England featured the project here.
Comics are a great way to explain a project. This is an extract of a strip I recently created for the project Autiscom in France.
I have created a series of editorial illustrations for a pretty timely article on the subject of remote working by Petros Chamakiotis at ESCP Business School, Madrid. Read the article here.
As a freelance live illustrator this period is challenging as most events are being cancelled. But it is also an opportunity to experiment new things and as a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio, the digital world is my playground! I am currently experimenting with OBS and working on a lockdown-proof live illustration practice.
I am very honoured to announce that I am now a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio, a brilliant community of over 100 artists, creative companies, technologists and academics exploring experience design and creative technology. Through this residency I am hoping to develop an enhanced live drawing performance practice that brings a magical aspect to the audience’s experience. Watch this space!
