PhD sketchbooks: IBF (18/3/20 - 8/4/20)

The sixth in the IB series. This is the one I was using when we went into the first UK lockdown and it shows. (Timelapse video of this sketchbook here!)

Started off with more drawings from photographs of things in museums, etc., following on from the end of IBE. Here's an older Mary Ann wearing a c.1841 dress from York Castle Museum.

These are from photographs I took when we visited Bowes. Quick dip pen and ink, and sometimes a brush.

Based on photographs I took while creeping around inside St Giles church, Bowes. William, Bridget, and a number of people they knew are buried in the churchyard, and there's memorials to more of their associates inside the church: one of the windows is dedicated to Mary Ann and her husband, and there's memorials to Rev. Richard Wilson (who was once William's business partner) and to members of the Harrison family (another of whom used to hang out with William sometimes). There'll be other connections that we don't know about! Did Bridget host intellectual salons in the front parlour with Rev. Wilson and others? Did her and William's kids run around with the Harrisons' kids while their parents chatted?

Initial ideas for the windows. An experiment in mythologising historical characters. 

See the east window here (and digitally placed in-situ here) and the west window here.

See the finished illustrations with a tangle of notes in sketchbook A4BB (right at the end).

Then - pandemic horror! I didn't catch covid, but I did get a strong (and, at the time, seemingly endless) bout of dread/ paranoia/ despair. My case study involves a disease - ophthalmia - so, thinking about how people react to contagions, I could use my own experiences as fuel/ material.

Historian uses his own context to inform his work. 

Left-hand page includes joke about ophthalmia-infected William self-isolating. I'm familiar with that feeling on the right-hand page: "I suppose it's time to descend into a pit of despair."

This sketchbook also includes notes on theory that I'd been reading, such as Alun Munslow's The New History (Pearson Education Ltd., Harlow, 2003).

Lower right-hand page: Munslow mentioned Natalie Zemon Davis beginning her book Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives with "an imaginary conversation between herself and her subjects" - oh hell, just realised I haven't read this book - ok back now, I have literally just ordered it and it looks great

More visual responses to things I read in Munslow's The New History. Pseudo-autobiography (would that look like puppetry?) and the historian being tangled up in the history they create. 

The resurrection comic ended up in my thesis. You know how it is when you want to do strange experiments, you use a load of bits of, uh, material (as some of the old resurrectionists used to call those that they dug up) and stick it all together and give it life, of a sort.

Then some slightly unsuccessful experiments on loose bits of paper. They weren't successful because I didn't really have any direction for them - I didn't have a solid intention or a question that I wanted them to fulfil. It was just me playing with materials, which is a useful and fun thing, but purposeless in this instance.

I realised I needed to use an incident from my case study, and interrogate whose perspectives might be involved. And this is how Disorder started...

I chose that point during the ophthalmia epidemic when William's life was, in the words of Henry Benning, "despaired of". I could give it a really short timescale or expand it as necessary. I could have chosen what might happen if one of the boys gets infected, but William nearly dying would have a wider social impact, so I could explore more people's viewpoints. However, I'd still be focussing on William, who's in charge of the Academy, so it could look like the Yorkshire schools version of history-from-above/ grand narratives about Powerful People Who Do Important Things and that sort of nonsense. Also I have a massive bias towards (my interpretation of) him and I enjoy drawing him. Right-hand page shows how I chose whose perspectives to interrogate/ explore.

Left-hand page is ideas for different visual languages - I needed one for each viewpoint I was going to explore. Right-hand page is my initial test for what became Mary Ann's visual language - I wanted to do something completely different to my usual tight colourless linework (now all colour, no outline!) - more experiments (and final illustrations) in this style in A4BC.

More of this sort of thing in the next one, IBG. Return to the sketchbook index here to view another.