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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Bunny Bunny
A zine exploring childhood transitional objects collecting memoryloneliness, lack of purpose, and forgottenness.
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Nan's House
The incredible knick-kanaks collected over a lifetime from my nans’ house. The telling of lineage, artifacts, and lived expereince.
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Memory Waves
A series of images showing memory, community, and most importantly, our collective relationship with aging.
The Collecting Crow
I began looking for stories in the world about collections and came across a crow story that excited me. When animals use human objects, the idea that we are more similar to them than we think becomes stronger. Our sense of humanity is challenged in a compelling way.
Are there other animals that collect?
Emerging Collections
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![Book cover on a yellow background featuring an outline of six squares containing fragments of a line drawing within them. The line drawing is of a mother and child.]()
Zine #1 Bunny
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![Book cover on a yellow background featuring an outline of four squares containing fragments of a line drawing within them. The line drawing is of a mother and child. The title is on top in a chunky serif font. The palette is cream, black and magenta.]()
Zine #2 Women's Faces
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![Book cover on a yellow background featuring hand painted lettering and line word of a mother's face and child's face on a blue watercolour background.]()
Zine #3 Memories
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![A book cover featuring a the hand painted lettering and mother child profiles facing one another. Black ink on cream paper.]()
Zine #4 Nan's House
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Zine #5 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.
“Katie, I can't thank you enough for your gorgeous work!”
Alice Kinsella (via Instagram)
Author of MILK
Learn more about what inspires me.
My story as an artist, book cover designer, seaside dweller and doing my MA.