My ancestors were children too

Written by Eszter Lerner, MA Illustration, Camberwell College of Arts.

A family memorabilia - Examining the ways of telling my family stories

I find playfulness, authenticity and enjoyment really important in my work. Personally, I enjoy mixing things up. I am interested in working manually, as well as working on the computer and sometimes combining the two using mixed media tools. How I choose to work, depends on the theme and subject of the project but it will always carry a strong, identifiable voice throughout.

Storytelling and narratives play a big part in my work and I get a lot of inspiration from the everyday life, by listening to others or observing my surroundings.

I have always been interested in stories of individuals and the social context these stories are embedded in. I started exploring the impact of social norms and that of society on life through childhood stories of women members in my family. I recently choose to work on this theme because of the pandemic as a way to connect with my family and feel closer to them.

I started my work by employing both qualitative and narrative research methods.  I carried out interviews and conversations with my grandmother and mother. I heard these anecdotes from my grandmother countless times and I wrote these stories down the way I heard them. These became my stories through writing, translating, structuring and illustrating them.  Whilst carrying out further primary research, my family photo albums also served as a valuable source of information.

The outcome, a non-fiction children’s picture book recounting the stories of 3 generations of family members, starting from the early 20^th century, with my great-great grandmother’s childhood, following with my grandmother’s childhood in the 50’s, and then my mother’s and aunt’s childhood in the 70’s. These stories tackle the topics of family relationships in the everyday life. The questions that I was interested in are: How social norms and relationships in a family circle have changed and evolved?  and, How does society and social norm impact the everyday life of family, children, and child - parent relationship? To find answers to these questions and to thoroughly understand my subject and have a comprehensive idea behind the family stories, I started doing secondary research. I collected written and visual material to gain knowledge about history, politics, hierarchy, customs, everyday life, social norms, architecture and fashion.

At the beginning, the challenge was to edit the material I had gathered. I started my image making as a form of research itself by experimenting with drawing from archival material, editing and connecting my family members in an image and mapping out how the events have happened in a linear timeline. I began responding to my archival material by drawing images of them as a way of understanding the space. I found myself being fascinated by the details of the architecture, clothing and the everyday objects.  This led me to combining different visual approaches and experimenting with the integration of my illustrations together with the collected archival photographs. I then physically cut up images and started playing around with their placement.

Each of my own family stories are a fragmentation of time and memories that I constructed into chronological order. As I was reconstructing the stories, I realised that they got a new layer of interpretation due to the way I was controlling how I retold and showed them. I found that there was an interesting relationship between the photographic material and my drawings and how they provided different layers and elements to the stories. The audience would see my interpretation of the narratives and the way I reimagined the past happenings.  You can also see elements of imbedded materiality as a way of integrating the wider historical - cultural - social and political contexts into the visual storytelling.

I wanted to express these stories in a light-hearted, playful and visually engaging way for a child audience.  Depicting the humour that these stories entail, I was drawing with a loose childlike notion, not tracking from the pictures directly and added a fantasy element to them, which I feel enforces that I am just reimagining the happenings of the past.

My goal is to capture and awake curiosity in children and motivate them to be interested in their family stories as well. By bringing my family stories to life, I would like children to come away from the book being encouraged to also be interested in their family stories as well. Talking about family stories together is a really personal and a uniquely different way of learning about history, social life, and norms because it can be experienced lots of ways.

Looking at my research topic and questions, I have noticed a gradual change regarding the child and parent relationship in these stories. My great-great grandmother, Margaret was born into a Hungarian aristocratic family. Her father owned a box factory who was always busy with work, so she didn’t have a close relationship with her parents and resisting the social expectations of the time in terms of children’s behaviour, she did a lot of pranks, following her own mind. Thus, her parents registered her into a religious school to teach her some manners. In the later stories I found that in my grandmother’s and my mother’s childhood stories the family had a closer relationship with each other and spent more time together.

Related links

• Email Eszter Lerner
• Eszter Lerner Instagram @eszter.lerner
• Eszter Lerner Behance Portfolio
• Post-Grad Community at UAL

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