Illustrated Collections
What are Illustrated Collections
An artistic practice that explores well-loved, often forgotten, and found objects through illustration. A place where collections become a lens for character, memory, and human connection.
Grounded in real places and objects, illustrated collections allow new worlds and narratives to emerge, layering fact with imagination to create an illustrative form of collage.
It all began with drawing my children’s things for my MA. Objects from their world that revealed the strange and wonderful collections their lives had nurtured, from stones and sticks to pens, toys, and everyday ephemera.
I began to notice how these objects carried meaning, belonging, memory, and character, and how each collection marked a specific moment in my children’s lives. Seeing these objects en masse shifted how I looked at them: no longer as individual things, but as narratives forming together.
Through this, objects began to take on personality, punctuating particular situations, times, and emotional landscapes.
How this practice came to be?
Collection as a Lens
I use collections as an umbrella for my practice to give myself focus, intention, and continuity in what I draw. Being quite scientific in my approach, I like to have an idea, a research intention, a brief, and then apply myself to it. This lens has allowed me to build a personal visual identity through a growing collection of collections, each rooted in the act of noticing what belongs together.
What draws me in are those connected to the natural world and to fundamental humanity . . . where individual elements gain meaning, power, and wonder when seen together.
The Collection of Collections
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Transitional Objects
A wordless 4-page zine looking at my son's transitional object, a much-loved toy bunny. A collection of illustrations documenting his life with this object, highlighting mirroring and connection for this well loved toy.
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Nan's House
Objects can transport us through time and space. Leafing through old photographs feels like an act of remembering, and drawing from my grandmother’s collection of things brings forward a quiet sense of nostalgia and memory.
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Memory Waves
Personal work developed for the book cover 'When the Cranes Fly South' by Lisa Ridzén. A collection of illustrations focusing on the main characters multitude of memories weaving throughout the story.
The Collecting Crow
A hopeful story about a young girl who received gifts from a crow that she fed, provided me with a connection to the natural world and collections. In the BBC story, the crow appeared to display human-like behaviour by collecting and exchanging objects for food. This led me to explore the intelligence of corvids and their ability to anticipate time, which felt significant when thinking about objects within a collection.
This exchange between girl and crow created a lasting reciprocal bond. The girl curated the gifts into categories, prompting me to question whether the crow was also curating. The crow ended up giving the girl a part of a necklace which had 'best' on it. The little girl liked to think that the crow had kept the bit that said 'friend'. This narrative inspired an 8 page zine with a simple narrative on one side, and a singular full bleed image on the other side showing all the curated crow gifts silhouetted.
Emerging Collections
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![An illustration a yellow background featuring a child carrying a stuffed animal bunny by it's arm. The child has white stripey pants and a black stripey top. The brush strokes are in black and white.]()
Transitional Objects
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![A square featuring made up of 9 square images (3 by 3) all depicting women from different viewpoints using a thick black brush stroke.]()
A collection of Women
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![An illustration of an old man with his dog and a cane. He has an orange scarf and the dog has an orange collar. The are done in watercolour and are perched upon a think ultramarine blue brush stroke.]()
Memory Waves
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![An watercolour illustration of photo strip featuring a woman in the 50s. She is wearing a white collar. The background is baby pink.]()
Nan's House
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![An illustration of a tiny pencil at the end of it's life. Above it are colourful shaving floating above it like clouds.]()
Stubby Pencil
Heritage Sites as Living Collections
Heritage sites function as collections in their own right, offering a curated environment where relationships between objects, images, and place can be closely observed. Drawing these elements together en masse, such as – paintings, faces, and frames within a National Trust property – allows familiar heritage objects to be seen with renewed energy and relevance.
Through illustration, I reinterpret place and history, creating works that are grounded in fact while opening space for new narratives to emerge. By layering and stitching together what already exists, the work deepens contemporary connection to heritage and the human stories within it.
“We keep and collect things be guided by some sort of fear of disappearance, mixed with an aesthetic pleasure. An obsessive attempt to organise the sense of their own existence and to leave their magnificent remains to immortality.”
Lydia Yee
Curator for The Barbican of the exhibition Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (2015)
Learn more about what inspires me.
My story as an artist, book cover designer, seaside dweller and doing my MA.