Contextual Statement
As an illustrator I am fascinated by what lies behind the stories we tell and by the hidden desires that comprise our unconscious, which might be revealed through our dreams or choice of words.
In my practice I explore what happens when an illustration doesn’t tell the viewer the full story; I create ambiguous and enigmatic illustrations to investigate what we can experience in the gaps between a text and an image and how we try to find meaning when we’re confronted with opacity, disjunctures, and gaps. I want to explore what happens when illustration abandons its usual role of helping the viewer understand a clear narrative and instead forces the viewer into forming something out of the tension between word and image, where there can be a slippage of meanings, and multilayered readings can emerge.
My approach to illustration is inspired by psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious. Freud theorized that in dreams the unconscious uses the mechanisms of condensation and displacement to keep forbidden desires from coming into consciousness in their original form. Instead, these mechanisms allow the unacceptable wishes through into awareness only if they are cloaked in disguises, which become the “manifest” content of dreams (Freud, 1900, 277).
This repressed, disguised material not only returns in dreams but also through slips and fumbles in our speech. Lacan argues that the unconscious can be revealed, among other things, in a person’s “stock of words” or their “own particular vocabulary” and in “legends” that form part of their history (Lacan, 1953, 215).
My illustrations use these ideas about the potential for unconscious material to be revealed through speech, by juxtaposing images and words in disjointed ways. The viewer is drawn to make connections between the phrase and the image—as is habitual—but in the absence of a clear narrative, the viewer might arrive at a reading that points toward buried symbolic associations.
For example, in one of the illustrations, the phrase “big leaves coming” was taken from an interview with somebody who was discussing a design they had created for their start-up business branding, featuring a sprouting plant that had, as they put it, some “big leaves coming.” Through a psychoanalytic approach to illustrating this phrase, I have drawn out different associations: the viewer might infer from the illustration a sense of goodbyes, leaving, growing up, and crossing new thresholds. These themes of loss emerged in other aspects of the same interview. This approach to illustration can offer the possibility for other readings of a text that may open up unexpected unconscious resonances.
I am excited by this way of working because illustrators are often given the message that they have to perform a certain function or service that entails working in a conventional way to aid the reader’s understanding of a concept or text. Against this, my illustration practice challenges the notion that any text has a fixed meaning that enables me to adopt a way of working that allows for my images to play on unconscious meanings and to offer multiple levels of resonance. Through a psychoanalytic approach, it is possible for illustrators to adopt a more subversive way of engaging with a text where illustration can move beyond subservience to have a more challenging voice.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams” (first part). In James Strachey, ed. and trans. (2001), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IV (1900). London: Vintage. 1-626.
Lacan, Jacques (1953). “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Bruce Fink, trans. (2006) Écrits. New York: Norton. 237–68.