A whiff of grapeshot: practice research and the image-maker-as-historian

This graphic research paper contributes to wider debates about creative practice as a form of historical research. While much has been written on how visual culture – film, comics, video games, theatre, fine art – can offer complex portrayals of the past, there remains a disconnect between appreciating art/design as an inventive form of representation and valuing creative practice as academic historical research in its own right. Drawing on formal and stylistic techniques discussed in comics and ‘comics- based research’ studies, we present an interrogation of the ways in which creative practitioners engage with documents, artefacts and, indeed, more philosophical debates on the nature of history. Told as an imagined dialogue between a historian and an artist, our narrative overflows with historical references, informed speculations (what Natalie Zemon Davies called ‘possible truths’), metaphors, symbolic juxtapositions and temporal leaps. We encourage readers to engage with text and image as two separate narratives, with the latter often expanding the argument beyond the former’s more straightforward exposition. Extensive, explanatory endnotes conclude our paper, but, as we argue, any individual reading could elicit different interpretations, with readers devising their own meanings and filling in the gaps.