11.00(BST) 27th May 2026

Tickets available here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/drawingresearchgroup/2210426

Polyphonic Lines is the second in a series of online events in collaboration with the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University, which explore the relationship between Drawing and Storytelling. Drawing begins where words cannot reach, and storytelling begins when images ask to be read. This first panel brings together artists and researchers exploring the theme of narrated memories.

Isabel Herrera-González’s presentation Between Lines: Drawing and Visual Storytelling investigates the porous boundary between Drawing and Storytelling, asking how meaning is generated when image and narrative are no longer treated as separate systems but as interdependent acts of thought. The research question guiding this inquiry is: What can be made possible in the space where drawing and storytelling intersect? To address this, the project examines drawing as residue —of bodily movement, decision-making, and participation— and storytelling as an unfolding choreography of images that resists fixed interpretation. Meaning is understood as emergent and relational, produced through acts of reading, viewing, and participation rather than embedded in the work itself. The proposed presentation combines visual documentation, performative narration, and reflective analysis to introduce the participatory project Líneas de Vida (Life Lines). Through this work, storytelling is enacted through absence, incision, and flow, while drawing becomes a temporal event shaped by chance, voice, and encounter. The presentation will argue that drawing and storytelling share a mutual structure of unfolding and refolding, each carrying what the other cannot articulate. In doing so, the research reframes both practices as co-creative, living processes that activate the space between sign and meaning as a site of possibility.

Amy de Nobriga’s presentation Mapping Monsters: Visualizing the Sublime in British Gothic Literature investigates representations of the sublime in three foundational Gothic texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which collectively shaped the trajectory of British horror literature (Twitchell, 1983). The research employs distant reading to reconceptualize narrative analysis by treating text as data rather than narrative prose. Through systematic examination of character dialogue, linguistic patterns, and “speculative morphologies” (Silverston, 2001:321), the project generates datasets that inform visual interpretations. These are articulated through a “data-drawing vocabulary” (Lupi, 2017), utilizing geometric forms—principally circles and triangles—to evoke Burke’s aesthetic categories of “the beautiful” and “the sublime” (1757). Gestalt principles further underpin the approach, isolating visual perception from linguistic interpretation (Lupton, 1996:62) and enabling the construction of taxonomic topologies. Responding to Munari’s assertion that “visual language changes according to the needs of the day” (1966:39), this work advocates for innovative modes of reading canonical texts, where “words and images grow radically unstable” (Morris, 1985:299). Schober conceptualizes this as “a space of potentiality between two modes of knowing” (2022:68). This article interrogates whether visual disruptions can destabilize established narratives and, in doing so, generate alternative interpretative frameworks. By integrating mathematical and systematic visualization techniques, this research proposes an unorthodox methodology for meaning making in storytelling, illuminating Gothic narratives through data-driven abstraction.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff’s and Carole Lévesque’s presentation Unfolding Stories: Drawing as Multivocal Narratives suggests that drawing makes sense of the world by fostering the cocreation of stories. Drawing rests on the accumulation of traces, the transcription of codes and their decoding and recoding by others, and as such is tied to other actions of making sense together. Tracing or following a line is akin to telling, recounting, remembering or listening to a story. As such, the sense that drawing makes is not given but constructed. It is a process that shares much with the way narratives are built, in its crafting, its communication and its architectonics (Bakhtin). The spatial and temporal assemblies of drawing are, in fact, narrativeassemblies and relationships (De Certeau) that connect us to a deeper sense of being and belonging (De Toledo). More so than any other dimensions of drawing, these narrative assemblies have the capacity to organize, connect and relate. 

Using examples from their upcoming book on drawing and the imaginary of place (Bloomsbury), this presentation explores how a narrative understanding of drawing invites polyphony and thus implies the presence of difference and plurality. Drawings, in this sense, are cocreated stories. Kenniff and Lévesque focus on their respective drawing practices that each fosters a different understanding of place, their construction and evolution, their spatial and temporal dimensions, and the ways in which their depiction in drawing can create the semantic surplus (Pérez-Gómez) necessary to any world-making story. In looking between process, artefact and the world thus depicted they ask: can a drawing be read as an unfolding, multivocal story?  

The session will be chaired by Rachel Gadsden-Hayton.

Biographies

Born in 1996 in Spain, Isabel Herrera studied Fine Arts at the University of Seville, Spain, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in performance drawing. Since 2002, she has been a member of the Research Group HUM-1025: Creation, Graphic art, Aesthetic and Gender.

Amy de Nobriga is the Course Leader on the BA and MA Illustration programmes at Leeds Arts University. They are an illustrator, researcher and academic. They hold a degree in Graphic Arts and an MA in Illustration. Their practice-led research focuses on exploring abstraction and unseen narratives through unorthodox methodologies.

Thomas-Bernard Kenniff and Carole Lévesque are professors in environmental design at the UQAM School of Design, Montreal and cofounders of the Bureau d’étude de pratiques indisciplinées (BéPI) focusing on hybrid research-by-design methods. Their work explores drawing as a means to investigate spatial and temporal dimensions of the built environment. They are the coeditors of Inventories (BéPI, 2021) and -in Drawing (BéPI, 2024), as well as the authors of the upcoming book Drawing and the Imaginary of Place to be published by Bloomsbury this year.