Fields of Practice: the Kitchen and the Studio

This essay reflects on over two decades of teaching, making, writing and thinking about illustration. It considers how the values that sustain working and home life have become entangled through the navigation of personal and professional worlds. Presented as an autoethnographic narrative, it takes the form of a bricolage of insights assembled from experiences and encounters over this span of time. It explores how the various claims on time, energy, creativity, attention and knowledge have often become a unified field of activity, with insights grounded as much in the practices of everyday life as in creative making or pedagogy. Here, practice is understood as the reconciliation of ideas, imagination and the feelings of an interior life with the constraints, opportunities and materials available, and with the interactions and relationships that make things possible.