Illustration & the Paper Artefact
4th–6th September 2025

Registration for the conference is now open here: 

https://store.falmouth.ac.uk/product-catalogue/conferences-and-events/falmouth-conferences



Schedule
Thursday 4th September: 
Welcome, Keynote talk, drinks reception
(afternoon/early evening)

Friday 5th September: 
Talks, panels, workshops, posters and exhibition 
(all day). 

Saturday 6th September:
Talks, panels, workshops, posters and exhibition 
(all day).


Accommodation
There are lots of guest houses and hotel in the very near vicinity of the Woodlane campus (TR114RH) where the conference will be held. Woodlane is very close to the centre of town and a short walk from Gyllyngvase beach. 

Find further information about accommodation here: https://www.visitfalmouth.com/

You will also find a wide range of places to stay on Air BnB.

Travel
  1. There are easy regular train links to Falmouth Town. Most train routes connect into Truro from which it is a short change of train to Falmouth Town. The station is a short walk to the campus and near by accommodation options. Services are offered through GWR, you can plan your journey here: https://www.gwr.com/your-tickets
  2. If local to Cornwall and Devon, the U1 coast to coast bus offers frequent routes into and from Falmouth.







Illustration & the Paper Artefact
4th–7th September 2025

Our Keynote Speakers

Shaq Koyok, ‘Awas Mawas: A Puppetry for Indigenous Empowerment’

Shaq Koyok is an award-winning Indigenous artist and activist from Malaysia. His art emphasizes the inequalities that exist between modern consumer-based lifestyles and traditional sustainable ways of life. His works is refection of the people and the rainforest in which he grew up and captures a contemporary view of the struggle faced by Malaysia’s indigenous people. He has exhibited all over the world including la Biennale di Italia, Venice in 2022, and as an Artivist-in-residence with Artivist Network for COP28, Dubai, 2023. 

Tim Knowles, ‘Paper Landscape’ 
Tim will talk about a number of his projects that utilise paper and cardboard in the context of his wider practice, his use of paper as material; the folding and manipulation of paper to create structures that act as landscapes and his current experiments with tracing paper.



****Submissions are now closed****

  • CALL FOR PAPERS:

    Illustration & the Paper Artefact
    4th—6th September 2025
    Falmouth University, Falmouth Campus, Falmouth, Cornwall, UK

    This conference aims to bring together illustration scholars and practitioners to identify historical, aesthetic, social and environmental contexts within which the materiality of paper works to enhance processes of illustration. Paper acts as both the positive and negative space of illustrated narrative, the illustrative object and site of communication. Its tactility comprises both conscious and unconscious expressions. 

    Paper can be engineered, folded, turned, cut-out, collaged, tissued, layered, burned, manipulated. It is the material of dimensionality itself, highlighting 2D and 3D as expressive formal choices. The relative affordability of paper as a medium has multiplied its disseminative and activist possibilities.  Its impermanence signals ephemerality and motivates the archival drive to preserve. 

    Paper can be understood as artefact, not only in the sense of being a physical object of its present time, but also as a physical object whose future is marked by deterioration; today, paper immediately calls forward the ecological necessity to recycle and manufacture sustainably.

    Paper is current and discursive in its many social applications. Its properties allow for working on miniature, life-size, and monumental scales, granting illustrative practices the ability to operate in diverse impactful ways. Paper is often the material that models a final product. 

    We invited 250-word abstracts for:
  • 20-minute papers
  • Academic posters*
  • Panels
  • Workshops 
  • other

  • On such topics as:
  • Paper engineering in storytelling and in information illustration
  • Cardboard and its illustrative applications
  • Philosophical approaches paper’s properties including folding, cutting, layering, appliqué, tissuing,deterioration, translucence, palimpsest
  • Paper engineering in storytelling and in information illustration
  • Cardboard and its illustrative applications
  • Philosophical approaches paper’s properties including folding, cutting, layering, appliqué, tissuing,deterioration, translucence, palimpsest
  • Book art and its constitutive elements such as the page-turn
  • Paper craftivism; papercraft
  • Anatomical illustration; paper and the body
  • Recycling and mindful sustainability
  • Newsprint, zines and comics
  • Puppetry, including papier mâché, toy theatres, shadow puppets, and pageantry
  • Dress patterns and fashion illustration
  • Non-European usages of paper within illustrative media
  • Stamps and other everyday paper items of illustration
  • Models and prototypes as tools of illustration
  • Paper as artefact in all its possibl considerations, including the demise of paper
  • 2D and 3D illustrated narrative
  • Wallpaper design
  • Sketchbooks
  • Paper dolls and dollhouse
  • Early illustrated serial novels and their fundamental reliance upon properties of paper
  • Maps, including decolonising perspectives

*Posters will be accepted as either high-res digital files, or as physical PAPER OBJECTs to be considered for exhibition at the Falmouth Art Gallery. Anyone submitting physical paper objects will need to post or deliver their work when complete.

****Submissions are now closed****


To get in touch with us, please email: paperartefact@plymouth.ac.uk