Through multidisciplinary co-creation with a remote, rural, coastal community, this project aims to place spirituality at the center of life, capturing insights, understanding and knowledge of spirituality (‘thin space’) and its benefits to individuals, heritage, community, culture and landscape.
Research
- Introduction
- Context
- Research Questions
- Methods
- Contribution to the field
- Publications and Dissemination
- Analysis & Key Findings
Outputs
- Thin Spaces book
- Poster
- Spontaneous essay
Email
A Spontaneous Visual Essay
31 July 2025
This visual essay reflects on a participatory project with the Lyn Valley community that integrated illustration, graphic design, and talking history methods to generate new knowledge about intergenerational experiences of thin space. Through co-created visual notetaking and mapping generated from focus-group discussion and empathic listening, we captured spoken and non-verbal expressions of experience that amplified spaces of communal connections, and visualized how these ties might be sustained, nurtured, and celebrated, through individual and collective memory and history.
We approached thin space as spatial-temporal interstices of lived experience and sensory connection to the ‘other’; liminal zones in which human and more-than-human worlds blur, where spatial location becomes unbounded and time is suspended.
Our essay builds on the methods originally employed in the Lyn Valley. The core research team (illustrator, graphic designer, oral historian) engaged in focus-group dialogue and visualization to spark individual and collective recollection.
We physically cut and collaged fragments from our annotations and sketch notes, integrating headings and quotations to structure the essay, before adding further layers and annotations digitally. This iterative, tactile method of collaborative and embodied synthesis functioned as deep, reflective, analysis: preserving and strengthening the relational integrity of our dialogue.
Throughout we remained responsive to and engaged in thin space’s ephemeral nature; the process offering an intuitive space to embrace ‘the other’. We all recognized a blurring of boundaries, welcoming insights, and perhaps obsessions or delusions, from elsewhere. We conceptualize this process as a form of empathic, intuitive and animist translation. A critique might be that we are engaging in ‘magical thinking’, but we present the project outcomes - a book, academic poster and now visual essay - as dialogical artefacts that offer new ways of seeing: reflective mirrors rather than fixed representations.
We used multi-modal methods to honour participants' narratives without reducing them to static, monodisciplinary outcomes. Oral histories offered intimate testimony; graphic design provided a scaffolding for these narratives, enabling the arrangement of spatial, symbolic, and conceptual elements into a coherent visual framework; through illustration, heritage became animated as characters, animals and vignettes, sometimes giving shape to the intangible. Our encounters became thin spaces and our outputs manifested them. The process empowered participants and brought people together revealing transformative potential.
We offer a model for illustration as an embodied, reflexive, and multisensory research method that embraces radical listening, intuition, and the more-than-human.
Quotes in Essay
'Thin Space = 1/5 Em Space... Blank space between wor[l]ds should be such as to ensure that wor[l]ds are visibly separated from each other — if spacing is wider, there will be holes between wor[l]ds, if smaller, it will be difficult to tell one wor[l]d from another. You can’t measure space with a ruler(...).' (Danilova 2020: n.pag)
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‘Oral sources are narrative sources. [98] The result is narratives where the boundary between what takes place outside the narrator and what happens inside, between what concerns him or her and what concerns the group, becomes quite thin, and personal “truth” may coincide with collective “imagination”.’ (Portelli 1981: 98-99)
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‘Working across the board, breaking across boundaries, experimenting and mastering media, none truly belonging as their own, the illustrator still finds ways of making his or her mark.’ (Zeegan 2020: 19)
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Across the UK Church attendance is falling. (Church of England 2023)
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‘Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.’ (Celtic proverb)
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‘What does it mean to ‘know’, to generate reservoirs of knowledge as to how space and place are variously thought about, experienced, represented, inhabited, contested, imagined, constructed, practised, performed, produced, consumed, projected or simply felt ...’ (Roberts 2018: 3)
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‘Worship space and experience therein, have the potential to realign one’s sensory system with the possibility of addressing detachment, alienation, isolation, and solitude (often brought on by technology and the way life is lived).’ (McNabb 2016: 42)
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‘Cross-discipline working that listens to the whole story.’ (Evans 2024: n.pag)
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‘Go craft spaces (…) balancing cognitive knowing and intuitive knowing; opening the eyes, unstopping the ears, inhaling deeply, touching sensitively, and tasting intentionally.’ (McNabb, 2016: 10) … ‘How thoughts grow by association with other thoughts is not categorically different from how selves relate to one another. Selves are signs. Lives are thoughts. Semiosis is alive. And the world is thereby animate.’ (Kohn 2013: 23-24)
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‘We are drawn into making drawings and the drawing draws us into further thinking.’ (Rosenberg 2008: n.pag)
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‘Creativity in research is not solely about thinking in the cerebral sense: it also involves elements of human 'knowing' such as 'intuition', 'imagination', and ‘wonder’.’ (Kara 2020: 15)
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‘socially engaged artistic and cultural practices to provide communities with opportunities for self-understanding and resistance to dominant social imaginary…to open “cracks in the system” and “allows” us, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, to participate in new experiences and to establish forms of relationships that are different from the ones we are used to.’ (Carpenter et al. 2021: 1908)
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‘Tapping that spatial dimension—and thus liberating readers from the bonds of linearity—is among typography's most urgent tasks.’ (Lupton 2010: 92)
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‘[William Blake] envisioned imagination as a faculty that expands perception beyond the limits of the physical senses, allowing individuals to apprehend spiritual truths, hidden realities, and visionary landscapes.’ (Rahaman and Rooman 2024: 4)
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‘Thin Places appear when layers seep into one another, making the realities of worlds we co-inhabit simultaneously present to our minds eye.’ (Healy 2016: 44) … ‘In religious aniconism we experience awe and humility at what is so great that it is always beyond us, non-representable (taboo; too special) and unrepresentable (has no visually observable form).’ (Grove 2024: n.pag)
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‘Illumination—once offered by the moon’s dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of the sunlight on the wind- rippled surface of mountain tarn—was now set down in an unchanging form.’ (Abram 2011: 281)
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‘All this information is shown in its entirety for the viewer to interpret using their own conventions, relying only on a small prompt from the author.’ (Davey and Grant 2024: 1)
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‘We are more expansive than we imagine. And this expansiveness is both powerful and frightening. It can ruin you to madness, or fate or God or disease or demons or whatever you call the unknowables. But it is gorgeous, too. It’s how the better unknowables get in.’ (Kisner 2016: 148)
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‘Narratives of memory, in which real events are recalled, stand to guarantee us occasions for some serious moments of reflection…the passage of time which brought forth freedom has given legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’ (Ndebele 1998: 20)
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‘The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric).’ (Barthes 1977: 159)
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‘A turnip and cockroach meringue’ (Kara 2020: 15)
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‘The experience of thin space is described not as a selfish experience, but, rather, as a possibility that shakes a person to new perception and a transformed life.’ (McNabb 2016: 1)
References
Abram, David (2011), Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York: Vintage Books.
Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, London: HarperCollins Publishers, (Fontana Press imprint).
Carpenter, Juliet, Horvath, Christina and Spencer, Ben (2021), ‘Co-Creation as an agonistic practice in the favela of Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro’, Urban Studies, 58:9, pp.1906-1923. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020927
Church of England (2023), Statistics for Mission 2022, London: Church of England. Available at: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/statisticsformission2022.pdf (accessed 11 July 2025)
Danilova, Anya (2020), ‘Manual: Spaces’, type.today, 20 Dec, https://type.today/en/journal/spaces Accessed 11th June 2025.
Davey, Gareth and Grant, Marcus (2024), ‘The visual essay and knowledge production: towards a visually informed understanding of urban health’, Cities & Health, 8:1, pp.1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2023.2275856
Evans, Merlin (2024), ‘Drawn to Listen: Illustration as Radical Research within the fields of Arts & Health’, lecture delivered at University of Plymouth, Plymouth, 10th October
Grove, Jaleen (2024) ‘What is illustration? A shadowy definition for illustration research’, Journal of Illustration, 11, pp. 21-44. https://doi.org/10.1386/jill_00083_1
Healy, Ciara (2016), ‘Thin place: An alternative approach to curatorial practice’, Ph.D. thesis, Bristol: University of the West of England.
Kara, Helen (2020), Creative Research Methods: A Practical Guide, Bristol: Policy Press.
Kisner, Jordan (2016), ‘Thin Places’, Ph.D. thesis, New York: Columbia University.
Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Oakland: University of California Press.
Lupton, Ellen (2010) Thinking With Type (2nd Ed): A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Student, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press
McNabb, Kimberlynn (2016), ‘Engaging the Senses to Occasion Thin Space and Transformation’, Consensus, 37:2, article 4. https://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol37/iss2/4/
Ndebele, Njabulo (1998), ‘Memory, metaphor, and the triumph of narrative’ in S. Nuttal and C. Coetzee (eds) Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa, pp. 19-28. Cape Town: OUP Southern Africa
Portelli, Alessandro (1981) ‘The peculiarities of oral history’, History Workshop Journal, 12:1, pp. 96-107, Oxford University Press.
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Roberts, Les (2018), Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space, London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Rosenberg, Terry (2008) ‘New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes Towards an Appreciation of Ideational Drawing’ in S. Garner (ed), Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, pp. 109-124, Bristol: Intellect, Limited.
Zeegen, Lawrence (2020), The Fundamentals of Illustration, London: Bloomsbury Publishing …