An Unsophisticated Art: Illustration’s folk art heritage

I position ‘folk art’ both as a genre of art that is engaged in tradition by imaginatively retrieving the past and as an emergent and evolving form of cultural expression. Alexa Galea (2014) argues that ‘folk traditions can be identified as ‘residual’ cultures - alternative and oppositional to the dominant culture of urban industrialised capitalism’. Folk art here is positioned as non -metropolitan, handmade and uncommercial. The perception of both folk art and tradition is that they exist ‘outside’ of modern life and the flow of historical time more generally. Folk as it is instituted in museums or categorized in print becomes historicised as set of ideas or forms. These become a visual lexicon that can be referenced and reinterpreted for different artistic purposes- whether to perpetuate a tradition or to reinvent or revive it.
Folk culture is also something that is still emerging and being invented, through things that ordinary people make for themselves. It is everyday creativity, made from the materials that are to hand. In his 1966 essay Design as Art the designer Bruno Munari claimed that 'the traditional artist is being transformed into the designer' making an explicit connection between 'traditional arts' and design practice, stating that this 're-establishes the long- lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing’. Folk art is art practice as a democratic and participatory activity (Wright, 2022). Illustration can be both a vehicle for ‘passing on’ tacit knowledge inherent in the folk art object, and the intangible cultural heritage that is embodied by making the work. I argue that illustration can be seen as working within a long historical continuum of ‘popular’ or vernacular creative expression, predating the invention of the printing press and rooted in vernacular image making practices. This situates it as an artisanal mode of creative practice which re-uses inherited forms and shared imaginaries to reinforce cultural and subcultural narratives, allegiances and codes of taste, communicating stories and making communities visible to themselves.