My research is inter-disciplinary, within the overlap between architecture theory and comics studies - recently entitled ‘Graphic Architecture’. As a nascent area of research, there are opportunities to shape the field, adding to existing research on social interaction with architecture and understanding of how the language of comics works.
Architectural environments have been paramount to many comics, and strips used as an architectural feature in Barbara Nessim’s installation at Centria, New York, and Joost Swarte’s interiors in Haarlem. This tradition can be traced back to sequential art on Trajan's Column and Stations of the Cross across Europe.
I will be researching how depiction of human interaction with architecture in comics has similarities with architectural drawings and capturing of architecture on film but offers possibilities that other media do not, and whether the medium has a more ‘revealing’ narrative quality regarding architectural interaction otherwise limited in other flat forms of depiction. To collect first-hand information about the creation of comics through interviews of practitioners, I present the UK’s only broadcast radio show on comic books – Panel Borders – on the Arts Council Radio Station (Resonance FM) in London.
I have presented preliminary research in this area at academic conferences hosted at the University of Stockholm and Manchester Metropolitan University, with a revised version of the former paper included in the anthology ‘Visions of the Future in Comics’ published by McFarland, August 2017. A revised version of the latter paper has been accepted by the journal Studies in Comics, to published by Intellect in 2018.
Funder: Design Star