Illumination through illustration: Research methods and authorial practice

This article proposes that the emerging field of illustration research embraces practice-led research, and will argue that it benefits practice outside of formal academic research. The author’s practice-led Ph.D. research provides the tools that will be used to investigate illustration methodologies within a research practice. These can be adopted to complement industry-oriented, brief-led ways of working to provide long-term transferable skills, enabling illustrators to be entrepreneurial, and give them a robust set of methods to identify and interrogate their subject matter. This article will begin with general research concepts to position illustration in relation to existing research methods literature, specifically that concerned with the development of research in art and design that involves a practical element. This will reveal illustration to be ‘fundamentally exploratory, involving innovation and risk in ways that are familiar to researchers in the broader community’, a key characteristic of practice that lends itself to research (Candy and Edmonds 2010: 126). The article will take in a very brief outline of existing and emerging research paradigms and how illustration research relates to these, and then reflect upon how the emerging field of illustration research may be poised to contribute to the transition between paradigms through its ambitious approach to image–text relationships. Here illustration can contribute to the academic discussion of how to disseminate research findings through writing and images, showing illustration to be a valuable voice within the development of practice-led research. Having established illustration as commensurate with inductive research the focus will shift from research on to research in illustration, commencing with an investigation of several specific methods used within my practice-led Ph.D. research. Extending the earlier discussion of research paradigms into illustration methods will be seen to raise questions that help us to articulate how practice operates differently within different strands of illustration. This will be accomplished in the form of a commentary on how research methods terminology can facilitate discussion of illustration’s link with the world and the viewer, to counter the expectations of the field and limits of existing metaphors that do not encourage us to view the world differently. Such discussion is a practical response to Mason (2000b), Bowman (2008), Poynor (2009) and Zeegen (2012, 2014) who note illustration’s limited vocabulary and how this limits its link to the world it purports to speak of and to. The benefit to the study of illustration is that we can gain a clearer understanding of how it operates as a practice, and derive theoretical ideas from concerns raised by and within illustration. I will then go on to propose that an inductive approach to research and the methods discussed therein (in particular grounded theory) can be adopted within illustration practice, which serves to reinvigorate the forms and language used as practical vehicles for outcomes. I will argue that this is of contemporary relevance to shifts in the commercial workplace, and that an inductive approach (where the outcome of a project is not fixed from the outset) represents long-term skills that equip illustrators with a flexible practice that allows them to be proactive in the development of new employment opportunities. Illustration research in relation to existing research paradigms In order to explore what illustration research might be I will explore the practitioner’s position as a researcher within broader research paradigms. The two major traditions are summarized briefly by Rudestam and Newton (1992) as quantitative and qualitative research, differentiated by their epistemological approaches. They define quantitative research as objectivist, in that knowledge must be verified by corresponding to the real world, and research takes the form of hypothesis-testing using empirical research methods. This is not what this article is concerned with, for the process described here overlaps with qualitative research as Rudestam and Newton summarize it. Therefore it is ‘constructivist’, with knowledge being constructed rather than discovered (Rudestam and Newton 1992: 47). The research approach discussed here is inductive, which Collins (2010: 43) explains is usually focused on understanding the context within which the phenomenon of interest sits, and is open to a variety of explanations for it (whereas a deductive approach starts from such an assumption and looks to establish a cause-and-effect relationship). In that it responds to the data continually emerging, the study can be more flexible in its evolution. This approach acknowledges the role played by practice in directing the course of the research, with methodology being emergent and responsive accordingly, as described by Barrett (2007a: 6). Gray and Malins (2004), Haseman (2006, 2007) and Bolt (2008) position practice-led research in the arts as a separate paradigm, with its own methodological, epistemological and ontological concerns. Haseman argues for the recognition of an emerging ‘performative paradigm’ where the practical work produced enacts change in the world as its contribution to knowledge. The aim here is to ask questions of illustration to establish how it operates as research, and more broadly to contribute to the definition of the artistic paradigm in order for that to reflect a variety of practices. To do so I will draw upon the chart shown in Figure 1 from Gray and Malins (2004): Illustration research is relatively new and still developing, therefore this is an appropriate time to be exploring what illustration research might be and equipping ourselves with the tools to do so. It also means that we do not have a great deal of guidance in the form of appropriate research methodologies, or discussion of ontology and epistemology with regard to illustration. Questions arising from this table’s relationship with illustration research include consideration of the researcher’s relationship with the world, how they go about investigating it and their audience’s relationship with the research materials produced. How their work negotiates this reveals underlying assumptions about these issues. Therefore the discussion here focuses on practical methods, in line with Bolt’s emphasis on research-through-practice giving rise to a different mode of thinking and different theoretical insights to the ‘self-conscious theorization’ of ideas applied to practice (Bolt 2006). Practical methods do not consciously follow paradigmatic lines; they follow Denzin and Lincoln’s description of the methodological ‘bricoleur’. The bricoleur crosses the boundaries of research paradigms with differing world-views unwittingly (and often unproblematically) in the main as part of the ‘poetic making-do’ borrowed from Michel de Certeau and applied to methodology (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 4, 6). Questions arising that concern the researcher’s world-view and assumptions ought to be resolved within practice as ethical issues concerning the role of the researcher (that are specific to the topic of enquiry and the illustrator-researcher’s situation), rather than be dictated at paradigmatic level and adhered to as strict methodology. Practice as research: Research on, in and for illustration A variety of critical frameworks already exist for analysing finished work (research on illustration) and its relationship with the viewer, and therefore this article will concentrate instead on the production of illustration. This is the unique contribution made by practice-led research, which in its flexibility can take risks with practice that cannot be taken if studying someone else’s practice. This section will examine how illustration practice operates specifically as practice-led research in art and design. In order to define this we can return to Christopher Frayling’s influential 1993 article, which outlines the three categories of research in art and design, namely, research for, into and through practice (Frayling 1993: 5). These distinctions form the basis of contemporary discussions of practice-led research, with useful refinements contributed by Henk Borgdorff who reworks Frayling’s categories into research on, for and in the arts. The latter category is ‘when the research unfolds in and through the acts of creating and performing’ and uses the practice as the ‘methodological vehicle’ for the study (Borgdorff 2010: 46). These terms will be adopted hereafter. Borgdorff does not neglect the contribution made by the previous two forms of research, which is particularly relevant to the current requirements for doctoral research to produce a written thesis, which articulates the non-linguistic aspect of creative practice that is the focus of research in for Borgdorff. This article takes into account the production of illustration to reflect Borgdorff’s research in art. At no point will research for be investigated, for as Stephen Scrivener (2010: 261) points out, this aspect of arts-based research ‘is not required to yield new knowledge and understanding […] [it] does not satisfy the goal condition of academic and professional research’. With regard to the most appropriate term available to describe this research in practice, Carole Gray’s definition of practice-led research is succinct: research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems, challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and practitioners; and secondly, that the research strategy is carried out through practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as practitioners in the visual arts.