This year we turned to the theme of the Monstrous – a subject whose growing relevance to the moment we could hardly have guessed at when choosing it. At the 2017 Falmouth Illustration Forum the painter Marcelle Hansellar, illustrator Virginia Mori, writers Lauren Elkin and Deborah Levy, and founding member of Abake design collective Maki Suzuki, all gave us some great insights and reflections on monsters and their significance. This year we also saw visits from Posy Simmonds and Graham Rawle, and welcomed several outstanding new teaching contributions, including from alumnae Phylly Bluemel and Irene Vidal Cal.
The work in this year’s MA show, Index, includes explorations of the afterlife, sci-fi as inner space, flaneuse, love and melancholy, voyeurism, traces, the body, myth and fantasy, landscape, historical research and graphic memoir; there will also be a one-day Forum here this Thursday 31st, Co-Lab, exploring artist-curator collaborations. We have some stunning and innovative new graphic novels, and celebrate
the publication of New Slang, which launches a new alumni collective of that name.
We are delighted to congratulate two alumnae on awards received this year: Emily Juniper, both for the Society of Bookbinders’ Wyvern Award and the launch of Juniper Bespoke, her innovative bookbinding project based at Old High Street, Falmouth; also Mairead Dunne, for the British Library’s 2016 Michael Marks Poetry Illustration award given to The Clearing (Atlantic Press 2016), making this the second consecutive year that
the MA Illustration community has picked up this prize.
Research has also been thriving: alumna Phylly Bluemel recently returned from Residency 108, hard on the heels of her completion of the Women’s Studio Workshop residency, both in New York State.
Two alumnae, Amy Goodwin and Louise Bell, began their PhDs this year; Louise also joined Ellie Robinson- Carter and MA lecturer Dr. Catrin Morgan at Illustration Research conference Shaping the View, Edinburgh 2016. The Cassiopeia project, a staff and alumnae collective led by Dr. Catrin Morgan, recently completed a very successful residency at Guest Projects, London, with Suspended Brunch, a work by our 2016 graduate Alex Bildsoe. Katie Jones-Barlow’s, Lydia Denno’s and Viktoriya Staykova’s materials for the Falmouth Illustration Forum 2017 were selected for the AWAKE Reading Room at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; MA student Kat Johnson exhibited this year in Behind Closed Doors, an animal rights exhibition in London curated by Sue Coe. MA lecturer Mat Osmond co-curated art.earth’s
In Other Tongues summit, currently being featured as six instalments of the Dark Mountain Project’s weekly blog posts.
Keiken Collective programmed a series of events at Newlyn Art Exchange which involved performances and workshops from staff, students and alumni. It’s been a good year, too, for new publishing ventures: alumna Jenny Sjodin has been awarded a three-book deal with a leading Swedish publisher; Ines Jaloto has been appointed designer at Walker Books, and our in-house Atlantic Press published Stone, a collaboration between the poet Em Strang and Mat Osmond, and we look forward to the immanent publication of The Red Haze,
a collaboration between Course Coordinator
Steve Braund and alumna Emilia Wharfe.
Current MA student Emma Butcher has illustrated a book by Booker Prize long-listed author Wyl Menmuir with the National Trust.