Day three Abstracts
Panel 6 moderated by Vincent Larkin
Author, illustrator, UX designer, Esperde / Germany & Coimbra / Portugal
Invited by Museum Schloss Fürstenberg, Germany, to transform the Museum adjacent to the historical porcelain manufacture into a garden to present their special exhibition “Pleasure Garden: Porcelain and the Art of Gardening”, Marei Schweitzer chose the use of paper. White as porcelain, and centuries old, the two materials correlate. Their sophistication lies in their subtlety. Large papercut scenography provided a perfectly contrasting in scale yet discreet background for the delicate exhibits. The sustainability of the material took a distinct position to the impact of human activity on nature, which is at the heart of gardening, making sure that the impact of the exhibition was as small as could be.
www.mareischweitzer.com | Instagram @mareischweitzer
Paper artist and teacher
This project explores the storytelling potential of papercut art through a live performance and a reflective twenty-minute artist presentation. The performance involves creating an intricate image from a single sheet of paper in real time, inviting audiences to witness the narrative emerge through physical engagement with the medium. This live process of making emphasises the materials fragility and resilience, and its role as both surface and structure for storytelling. Rooted in the rich traditions of Chinese papercutting and the German-Swiss practice of scherenschnitte, and the expressive approach by Matisse, the practice frames papercutting as a form of live drawing. Treating papercutting as an act of excavation, the work slowly reveals narratives embedded within the surface of paper, exposing layers of meaning through the physical act of cutting. The process itself explores immediacy, gesture and the permeance of the cut. The performance will culminate in a discussion reflecting on process, tradition, materiality, and the evolving language of paper art as a performative, narrative, and socially resonant practice. Participants will be invited to consider the physicality of paper, the subtleties of mark and cut, and the transformative act of revealing stories through a simple, sustainable material.
www.markcurtishughes.com
Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, BA (Hons) Illustration, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham
My work as an illustrator had always had a surface design focus, but in 2016 I pivoted my studio towards wallpaper design and production. This talk will reflect on the collaborative projects of the last 7 years and trace the ways that our wallpaper has been used as a medium for communication and storytelling through research and collaboration. Wallpaper lives inside our homes and is meant to stay up for many years. When you have wallpaper on your walls, you look at it every day, and sometimes you look at it without “seeing” it at all. Images seep into our brain this way and become a part of our life and form who we are. This is the starting point of our studio’s approach working alongside archives and community groups to share histories through images. Historically, wallpaper has always been an important carrier of the thoughts of the time. It was often used to venerate and communicate social mores: craft movements, haloed historical scenes, and technological developments (through things like fluorescent colours for example) have all been promoted through their representation in contemporary wallpaper. Key projects for Nottene include papers developed from collaboration with Winterthur Museum’s archive and library (Delaware), John Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (Baltimore) and Recycling Artist in Residency/ RAIR (Philadelphia).The talk will finish with new directions that have arisen from working with wallpaper and new decorative objects in development
www.kimberlyellenhall.com
Panel 7 moderated by Carolyn Shapiro
Graphic Design, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Since 2011I have worked with a collection of paper admiralty charts I found online. In this presentation I will discuss how they became a cornerstone of my practice and opportunities for illustrative enquiry they continue to offer. I was originally drawn to the aesthetic quality of the charts and the graphic language employed to describe coastlines spanning vast regions of the world. My specific interest has rarely been about the places depicted, but rather the potential of the charts as imaginative devices or speculative prompts. Rooted in a collage-based approach, I carefully choose sections of chart to develop palimpsestic and chance led compositions, informed by the printed notation and working markings. Beyond the markings, the paper is strong, smooth and maintains an aged patina that provides a rich, embodied meaning. My initial instinct was to screen print and overlay new narratives onto the charts, inspired by ledger art. I have subsequently cut, glued, painted, waxed, drawn on and remade them across various projects. New concepts emerge through the tactile handling of the materials, where previously overlooked details and possibilities emerge. Recently I have produced drawn compositions determined by the numerical depth markings, revealing unseen patterns in the data. I am interested in the charts’ journey from tool to discarded ephemera, where notions of value, meaning, object and image can be considered. The long out of date information might also remind us of the impermanence of anthropocentric understandings, offering possibilities to decolonise and reimagine the ever-changing environments we demarcate, measure and manipulate.
www.davidlemm.co.uk
Senior lecturer and course leader BA (Hons) Illustration, Arts University Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
Physical branching narratives reveal new tensions when paper escapes traditional book formats. How do engineered structures—modular inserts, tabs, wheels, domino tiles, split-tier pages—shift narrative labour between author and reader? This paper examines commercially produced works like Chris Ware’s Building Stories and Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, before exploring avant-garde cases including OuBaPo’s DOMIPO and Shiga’s unpublished “paper- computer” prototypes. Drawing on ergodic theory, artist-book scholarship, and multisensory studies, we argue that folds, slots, and rotations transform reading into spatial, embodied navigation. Through practice- based reflection and critical analysis, we consider how simple structures may lower creative barriers, while complex mechanisms demand more planning but offer deeper play. By foregrounding format as an active storytelling agent, this study situates branching comics within the wider discourse on paper artefacts and explores how the roles of reader and creator increasingly overlap.
www.benjaminography.com | Instagram @benjaminography
Panel 8 moderated by Nanette Hoogslag
Senior Lecturer, Arts University Bournemouth
The aim of this investigation is to unpack phenomenon concerning the digital mimicry or digital replication of the properties of paper in an online context. Within the field of illustration, social media presentation of physical paper in digital image can be seen as a communicative tenant of authentic illustrative practice. In a wider online context, the rationale of paper as well as our historical understanding of human interaction with physical publications has defined the user experience of webpages since the early days of the Internet. This investigation, in establishing the process of engaging with physical paper as a private psychological space, asks question of increasing corporate overstep in relationship to the evolved web spaces and social media places of today’s Internet. In our contemporary surveillance orientated web spaces, to read or produce an image or text is to generate data and profits for a myriad of competing, sometimes coexisting corporate and government entities. Nevertheless, viewed from an historical standpoint, in comparison to historical participation with physical paper, audiences today have vastly more opportunities to access surfaces to consume intellectual property as well as create new artwork, writings and cultural IP. We may be moved accept these surfaces, this evolved paper as a relatively benign interaction, the positive attributes far outweighing the negative. In contrast, we may consider the potential threat of increasingly unregulated consumption of private data. In awareness of this tension, this investigation aims to identify a fetishisation of paper evident in digital image, as well as structural leftovers discernible in the internet’s nostalgic and sometimes strange leftover anchorage to paper forms.
Communication designer & content developer, student at University of Plymouth
This research explores paper’s dual role as transitional medium in communication’s evolution and as a powerful material agent in contemporary discourse. Through practice-based investigation, the project examines two interconnected themes positioning paper within broader temporal and material contexts. The first theme investigates communication’s evolutionary trajectory, positioning paper within a continuum spanning ancient stone and metal inscriptions to emerging digital media. A copper plate etching serves as the central artefact, examined through three manifestations: the original copper plate (representing the past), its paper impression (embodying the present), and its digital photograph (anticipating the future). This analysis raises critical questions about paper’s potential obsolescence, questioning whether digital media will supersede paper as mass production once displaced earlier communicative forms. The second theme explores paper’s inherent material authority and its presence in both conscious and unconscious communication practices. A constructed paper pillar, incorporating diverse forms— toilet paper, cardboard, papier-mâché—demonstrates paper’s ubiquitous power and versatility. This sculptural intervention highlights paper’s capacity to function across scales and contexts, from intimate personal interactions to monumental public statements. Through these material investigations, the research reveals paper’s unique position as simultaneously ephemeral and enduring, democratic and authoritative. The work contributes to understanding paper not merely as passive substrate for illustration, but as active participant in meaning-making processes, embodying both historical continuity and contemporary urgency within our evolving communicative landscape.
Panel 10 moderated by Carolyn Shapiro
Lecturer, Arts University Bournemouth, UK
Paper is frequently regarded as an ephemeral and provisional material, and is often associated with modelling, rather than final artefacts. Its impermanence and fragility pose challenges to preservation and archiving. Due to the associations with craft and manual labour, it is praised for its ability to convey the material, intimate tangibility, which is simultaneously often the reason why it is juxtaposed to the world of the ‘digital’. However, this binary can be reconsidered through the lens of 3D technologies and the concept of surface, which bring the physical and digital into closer dialogue. When paper is understood as surface, and the fleeting nature of the digital files is likened to the ephemerality of paper, these two realms align closer together. This paper, as well as the consequent body of practice, proposes to study the ‘Illustration and the Paper Artefact’ conference’s physical paper artefact submissions through a process of 3D-scanning and digital archiving of these artefacts, with the archive being hosted by .RAW magazine. Drawing from heritage studies and museum studies, the paper will assert that the ephemerality of digital archives and, particularly, 3D models, as well as inaccuracies of 3D scanning, will produce new ephemeral digital objects that share qualities with their physical referents. It also proposes that the qualities of the surface in a 3D scan (‘invisibility’ of the surface, its fragile nature and difficulty in preservation) can serve as a metaphor and epistemic tool to interrogate not only the nature of paper itself, but also the broader challenges of mediation, distribution, archiving, and digital display of paper-based artefacts.
kseniakopalova.com | rrraw.work
Senior Lecturer, Falmouth University
This paper addresses the question: what are the benefits and experiential qualities of sharing material artistic practices in online spaces? Can examining the interplay of making work on paper from and through digital media invite new insights and ways of working? This presentation discusses the collaboration between myself and fellow artist/illustrator Shana P Lohrey, which utilises digital platforms and postal services to facilitate the exchange of ideas and artistic practices between Britain and Japan. To support this investigation, I propose to compare, and analyse the collaborative workings of creative practitioners, examples include Ukiyo-e artist print collaborations, William Kentridge’s workings with paper and technology, and Lenka Clayton’s conceptual and poetic collaborations and solo projects with artefacts. Through a series of online workshops, we investigate methodologies of world building, specifically, drawing imagined places, on varied paper types and sizes sourced from each other’s residing countries. This experimental, playful exchange seeks to explore the testing of papers and world-building practices to form a deeper understanding of the potential of distanced peer collaboration.
www.georgieillustration.co.uk
Falmouth University, UK
As a historian, being able to view digitised archives online enables me to look at artefacts that I might otherwise not be able to see. However, in an increasingly digitised world what is lost when we can’t see the paper artefact? This paper looks at the how Barbara Hepworth’s letters show the importance of touch and celebrates the lost intimacy of the letter. Barbara Hepworth regularly wrote letters to her friend Janet Slack, who lived just outside St Ives, and some of these letters are held in the collection of St Ives archive. Barbara Hepworth wrote of sculpture in 1959 that it ‘is perceived, above all, by the sense of touch which is our earliest sensation; and touch gives us a sense of living contact and security’. Touch was, for Hepworth, not only an essential part of the way we experience the world, but also how we understand and experience her sculpture. Touching Hepworth’s letters, in turn, creates a sense of connection across time, and the aura of the object and its presence in time and space evokes alternative readings encompassing affects that are lost in the digital archive object. In what way does the artefact’s presence change the way we understand them? What does ‘living contact’ as a research method reveal that the digital artefact cannot? This paper argues for the importance of touch, and the haptic experience of viewing letters in the intimate space of the archive.