Making Mapping More Mischief

What drew you to this project ? 

The brief for this project was to design and illustrate a map to accompany a walking tour and audio guide exploring folk customs in Hackney, Stratford and Bow as part of the Making More Mischief exhibition at London College of Fashion.

I was drawn to this project for several reasons.  I was interested in the multimedia nature of the project; the combination of an exhibition, a walking tour, map, an audio tour.  As someone who is disabled and has different access needs, contributing to a project that can be experienced in multiple ways (audio, physically, remotely) was especially exciting for me. I wasn’t able to walk the route myself because of my access needs, and used a combination of Laura (Thornley, who conceived and managed the project) taking photographs of the locations for me and walking the route using Google Street View. I think this gave me a unique perspective on the project and perhaps helped me bring it to life even more because I was relying on the research and my visual imagination and storytelling skills, rather than being tied to the physical geography itself.

I also have a mild obsession with maps and used to spend a very long time looking at OS Maps as a child. Being autistic, I have an excellent visual-spatial memory and have a three dimensional visual map of London in my head, which I can move and navigate around. I also grew up in London and have always been fascinated by the melting pot of social, political, and cultural stories and how they have shaped and continue to shape the city right down to the tiny details.  As an illustrator, I am interested in the places where disciplines intersect, blur and overlap- which is often the case in folkloric traditions. Most of all, I am passionate about the power of the arts and storytelling to offer an inclusive common ground upon which people can gather, learn and grow, telling working-class and marginalised stories that are often overlooked.

Your map is incredibly detailed and contains lots of different techniques, can you tell me about how you conducted research in order to achieve this level of detail? 

My creative process as an illustrator is informed by the subject matter- listening to the subject I am illustrating and letting its visual and material language inform my making, whilst also using materials from my own surroundings. I am a bit of a visual magpie. For example, the Suffragette image uses collaged elements from archival photographs that were used by the curators/researchers for the exhibition, as well as collaged photographs of daffodils in my local park! I wanted to use a range of different techniques to reflect the diversity of the folk customs and of London itself. I am also a very sensory person, and like my images to be tactile and engage multiple senses by using lots of different textures.

Can you tell me about the different techniques you used on the map? 

I used a range of techniques; digital collage with scanned and found materials, making a paper model of a narrowboat and photographing it, pen and ink drawings, and using a pasta machine as a printing press to make a form of drypoint etching prints in my bedroom! I learnt some of these processes on my course - we did a printing workshop with the artist Stephen Fowler who had figured out exactly which brand of secondhand pasta machine made the best prints! I wanted to incorporate analogue techniques to reflect how images were made contemporaneously to the folk customs. So, I made intaglio prints for the Bow Fair illustration as that would have been primarily how images were printed at the time (17th century). Although, probably not on a pasta machine…!