Irregular Interpretations exhibition at the Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham

Irregular Interpretations is the end-of-PhD exhibition that I did to coincide with my exam! It ran from Monday 11th to Thursday 21st December 2023, so no worries if you missed it, it wasn't on for long - but I got plenty of photos and a video! Open the images in a new tab if you want to take a closer look at them, the resolution isn't bad so the stuff should be legible.

If you visited, the first thing you'd've seen on your right is fifteen massive (Un)Known Associates cards, each one measuring 42x70 cm (16.5x27.5 inches).

Technician Ash attached the wires to the ceiling and I hung everything very wonkily (deliberately)

Straight ahead of you from the door were five A0 boards explaining some stuff about my work. View them on ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

Paul and Ash (the gallery technicians) got the scissor lift and the laser level out, and they hung these perfectly

On your left, there were sixteen extracts from my sketchbooks, showing spreads in which I made significant decisions.

Then, on the wall directly to your left as you enter, there was a life-size William with a load of things around him explaining how I'd created him as a character. (Ed for scale.)

There was also a table with copies of Disorder and (Un)Known Associates, sketchbooks that visitors were invited to draw/ write in (and some very excellent people did!), pens, a deck of (U)KA cards, and a box of leaflets.

Sarah, the director of the Hardwick Gallery, also made this enormous A0 poster which was up outside the exhibition. It's got the same text as on the Hardwick Gallery's website.

I stole one of these posters when me and my dad went to take the exhibition down today

But yeah, I had a launch event which was a good informal conversation with several splendid people who braved the hideous weather and traffic to get there, and then on Wednesday I had my exam, which (in hindsight) was actually really great (yeah, I was very nervous, but the only bits I can remember were just that everybody was extremely nice and kind to me and my examiners love my work, and they want to help me improve it so I have minor amendments and have to add another chapter to my thesis which basically involves reading a lot of comics)

Huge thanks to gallery director Sarah and the technicians Paul and Ash who helped me install it, and also to my dad for logistics, and also to Typecraft for the massive printing on foamex! I thoroughly enjoyed exhibiting - although planning it was a massive headache - but would 100% recommend, it's very useful experience actually putting things up in a proper gallery.

PhD sketchbooks: SBG (23/10/22 - 30/12/22) and SBH (1/1/23 - ongoing)

I made both of these books! (Timelapse video of both of them here!)

The cover of Small Book G (23/10/22 - 30/12/22) is a test sheet from (U)KA that I coloured on the other side using alcohol-based markers, so they bled through the paper and made strange indistinct shapes. Most of its contents relate to the thesis in some way.

Right: thinking about naming conventions for characters based on people in the past (referring to the actual individuals by their full name and surname, such as Charles Mackay or just Mackay, and referring to characters by first name, such as Charley); also some kind of diagram about connections with other works (which didn't make it into the thesis). (The (U)KA fragment in the middle is because I broke the book trying to open it for the first time, so I glued that in to fix it. Swipe through these to see the break.)

Left: woe and misery, thesis-flavoured. Right: thinking about image list for the end of the thesis.

Key words and such. THESIS THESIS THESIS I CAN THINK OF VERY LITTLE ELSE

Corralling themes in my thesis. I spent ages dealing with themes, rearranging bits, rearranging whole chapters, hunting for themes and trying different arrangements, over and over and over and over

Left: ideas I had while doing the above list. Right: realised I had a problem with some apparent binaries in character design, such as Ann/Beauty and Charley/Sublime (see SBA for earlier work on that) so I will be trying to fix this using multiplicity - further experimentation will hopefully result in other ways of sorting it out

Some of the people in (U)KA have scandals. And that's only the ones we know about!

Left: different Williams in Yorkshire schools historiography. Right: another possible problem with making characters based on real individuals - what would the subjects themselves think? (This comic ended up in the thesis)

Trying to use grids in thesis layout, thanks to my excellent supervisor KP for the idea

Doing a thesis like mine - you're not just typing things into a word processor and wrangling footnotes, you've got to work out how the images and the writing work together, playing with page layouts, working out how to use the programme (I use Affinity Publisher 2 which I had no previous experience with) - it's very involved and I hope the final outcome is worth it

Working out one of my chapter themes. I don't know how many different versions, different potential chapters, etc., my thesis has had - it kept evolving - but then I suppose that's the nature of this sort of thing?

Silly idea about using Major Arcana Tarot cards/ the fool's journey as a template for constructing a thesis with a linear narrative. Which I abandoned because it was amusing but would be a total headache to put together, and I was already considering thematic chapters (which makes a lot more sense) but potential fun and games for some postdoctoral project perhaps

More blasted themes. Sketchbooks are a place to work out problems, line things up, think on the page, etc.

Going over different sections of the thesis and trying to come up with drawings that I might need to make. Also some comparison of how I was at the start of the PhD (I had very restrictive ideas about what you could do as a historian, and then the History department at UoG introduced me to the joys of theory and an entire universe of fun) compared to now.

I got into the habit of making a new plan every week for what I was going to do that week on the thesis. I also make it lift books to make it stronger.

SBH (1/1/23 - ongoing) has a similar cover, but made from a print-out of William's card of terms from c.1831. This is also mostly thesis-flavoured. 

Left: I was unwell with a not-quite-cold and saw William in the bathroom mirror again (it happened a lot when I was recovering from my appendectomy, which was hilarious). Right: another thesis plan.

Went through my sketchbooks and made lists of all the most relevant drawings for my thematic chapters. 

Weird nocturnal incidents, notes on things I was reading, plans, and diagrams (which became the triangle diagram as seen in IBP, which ended up in the thesis)

Plans and ideas for bits that I thought needed turning into comics

There's a lot of spreads that look like this in this sketchbook - over twenty pages in total. Part of my strategy for dealing with doing a thesis: breaking work sessions into half-hour chunks, and meticulously keeping track of every change I made on the document. 

Left: silly two-panel comic done while listening to Teya & Salena's 2023 Eurovision hit Who The Hell Is Edgar? which made me wonder how William might have drawn, but there's no time left for any of that sort of thing (my deadline is at the end of September) but the word 'postdoctoral' is marching towards this conversation - but, through drawing that, I had some entertaining realisations about how I characterise William. Right: poses that I'd already used in thesis drawings

I think that might be it for PhD sketchbooks. There's still a few pages left in SBH for any last-minute things, but yeah, that looks like the end of that... To relive the ordeal, go back to the sketchbook index for more.

PhD sketchbooks: IBN (23/3/22 - 26/4/22), IBO (28/4/22 - 10/7/22), and IBP (10/7/22 - ongoing)

Investigation Book N (23/3/22 - 26/4/22) is filled with final illustrations for (U)KA! 

(Timelapse video of all three sketchbooks here!)

I drew the cards twice the size than they'll be printed. A lot of them are surrounded by extra notes (drawing is a way of thinking; by drawing these cards and associated sketches, I could have an explore other ideas)

Left: if I hadn't drawn that courtroom scene, I wouldn't have been thinking about it, and I remembered that Henry Benning, the local apothecary and surgeon who helped treat ill boys (and William) at Bowes Academy, had to accompany William and pals down to London in order to give evidence in the ophthalmia trials - that's, like, 248.5 miles away - nobody better get ill!

Right: one of the split cards, with two images on one card. 

Right: the Fool which is me with some costume reference to Joseph Grimaldi (the famous clown, contemporary with my case study) and some other clowns. Preliminary sketch version available in SBD

Left: the Perception (who turns up briefly in SBF) and who is from a project that I have not yet done because it's still in very early poking-the-ideas-around stages. Right: drawing the death of Mr Dixon and shock realisation! I'm drawing a bunch of cards about William's (Un)Known Associates, and I'm focussing on characters that I (think I) know more about. I probably wouldn't have realised that I was ignoring a load of people if I hadn't been drawing them! (Or intending on drawing them, but actually drawing different characters.)

Left: William upside-down again - while I was drawing this, I realised that the things that made him notorious (the ophthalmia trials and the publication of Nicholas Nickleby) are the main reasons why we know about him and why he is remembered.

Left: I found a brief mention in the Newcastle Courant (29 November 1828) about a road traffic collision that William and Bridget were involved in (at least, I'm presuming it's them! I've tried the parish register but I dunno if there were any other Shaws in the area) - it said, in full, “On Wednesday night, the 19th inst., as Mr and Mrs Shaw, of Bowes, near Barnard Castle, were returning home, a farmer’s cart ran against them, and upset the gig, and broke the springs and arms of the gig. Fortunately Mr and Mrs Shaw did not receive much personal hurt. The driver made his escape, and has not yet been discovered.” and I haven't yet seen it in any other Yorkshire schools historiography. Where had they been in Barnard Castle? What had they done, and who had they seen? Perhaps we'll never know! And that is nothing to be afraid of!

I did these two the day before another operation (I had two during the course of my PhD) - this one wasn't the appendix, it was something I'd needed doing for a long time - but the Star is about optimism and freedom and fortitude, and Death is about the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

Investigation Book O (28/4/22 - 10/7/22) also contains some (U)KA finals! But then it also contains a load of thesis stuff.

(U)KA workings-out, including a list of cards I'd drawn, how to arrange them on an A4 sheet for printing, characters that didn't appear in the cards (will have to use them in (U)KA2), how to arrange the cast list in the PDF, ideas on Jacob Metcalfe, and some other bits

More (U)KA workings-out. 

Thesis drawings! Freehand, like the vast majority of the rest of my sketchbook drawings. Comparatively few across my entire corpus of PhD work have preliminary pencil lines before I add the ink. I wanted my thesis to vaguely resemble a sketchbook, so this freehand type of drawing is going in.

Some of these stayed in the thesis (such as the ones on the left-hand page about how history is not done compared to how you make your own representations and interpretations and that).

Left: entertaining metaphor about using traces of the past, etc., to bring the dead back (which I can't do because they are dead and I can only make interpretations of them). Right: this one stayed in the thesis; despite liking the roughness of these freehand drawings, I edited out the extra lines around Wackford's legs and William's shoulders in Affinity Photo.

More thesis drawings. Sometimes I joke that I am a terrible 19th century father to my thesis; some of those comics ended up in the thesis itself.

Investigation Book P (10/7/22 - ongoing) is mostly thesis stuff. 

Left: ideas for physical artefacts tying in with Charley's visual language in Disorder. Right: some drawing about subjectivity (based on a rant from SBF) that didn't make it into the thesis

Potential cover designs for (U)KA

Thinking about modifying Bridget's characterisation (bit late in the game? POSTDOCTORAL HERE WE COME)

The triangle diagram ended up in the thesis. The two panels underneath it did, too, but the right-hand page didn't, as I thought it was spinning away from a topic I wanted to stay on.

More ideas towards drawings for the thesis, this time about using my own body as reference for William (which I am sure some more traditionally-minded historians would sniff at with great contempt)

Reworked historical sublime diagram

More final thesis drawings

And that is it for the Investigation Books! (Back to the sketchbook index here.)