Cardiff University’s school of Journalism, Media, and Culture have been a frequent client of mine since 2021, and I have always enjoyed working with them on socially-focused academic material.
The first engagement I had with them was providing a set of illustrations to accompany an academic report on how people of colour navigate artistic and social media spaces. As a person of colour myself, this was an excellent project to get my teeth into and one I enjoyed very much – being able to bring some of my own experience into this piece was quite satisfying both as an artist, and as a socially-minded person.
I was later asked to adapt Dr. Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill’s excellent book “Black Oot Here” into a comic format. The result was the graphic novel “Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us“, a comic aimed at early high-school pupils and published in English, Scots, and Gaelic. The aim was to bring the book’s message of Black history being a living entity present in the lives and communities of Black people in Scotland to a middle-grade age audience. Being entrusted with something so personal to the authors was an enormous honour, and I was able to pull through visual quotes and tributes to the authors’ Nigerian heritage in the artwork.
I have since been asked to provide additional supporting illustrations for the “Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us” website, as well as educational materials to support classroom use of the graphic novel.
