Research Task 4.0: Visual Diaries

This exercise introduced me to the concept of visual diaries and invited me to investigate the work of Myfanwy Tristram.

Myfanwy Tristram is a comic artist who uses her work to explore political contexts, parenting, and the realities of being middle-aged. She hosts a blog on WordPress where she documents her various artistic endeavours, promotes her comics, and connects with her audience. Alongside her comics, Tristram has dabbled in keeping visual diaries, which she has also uploaded in full to her blog. Her latest visual diary – documenting her trip to Florence, Italy – was the final installation in her collection. She discusses in the last blog post for the diary as well as elsewhere on her blog that, whilst she enjoys the process of making visual diaries, they are too time-consuming, and they don’t further her work in the way she desires.

In talking about the end of this journey with visual diaries, Tristram mentions that the Florence diary took around six months to complete and that she has travelled several times since the trip she is documenting. This implies that the visual diaries she was creating were intentional projects rather than an unknown and spontaneous project as described in the unit guide. Despite this, the diaries communicate a wonderful sense of her experiences, capturing the unique and intimate details of her time away.

Her diaries are detailed, colourful, and packed full of memories. Every page is used in full, featuring writing, drawings, paintings, and ephemera stuck in throughout. It’s synonymous with a scrapbook – a collection of stuff seen each day. She documents both the mundane and the great, from a selection of spreads on the breakfast table to huge landscapes and buildings. Each image is accompanied by writing of some sort, be it a description, a musing, a quote, or a short story explaining the memories behind it. It makes sense that Tristram would be drawn to doing this, given her primary focus on comic art. 

Ladies of the Lakes, one of Tristram’s published comics, could also be described as a visual diary. It explores the experiences of herself and her friend as they attend the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Rather than a hodge-podge scrapbook-esque style of sketchbooking, Ladies of the Lakes is entirely in sequential illustration. I absolutely loved to see this approach to visual diaries! This is the style I feel connected to in my own work, and reading through the comic, I found myself thinking of how many of my own experiences could easily be illustrated in the same way. Comics are a useful narrative tool, and their use in recording the everyday will always be core to the artform.

Looking through Tristram’s blog was extremely inspiring. A lot of the work she does is relevant to social causes I feel very passionate about, and her approach to these topics is fantastic. I’m very glad that this exercise introduced me to her and to the way she uses her comics and diaries. I would love to create work similar to hers someday.

All of the work referenced in this post can be found on Myfanwy Tristram’s blog – here.