[LAUIL601] Visiting Lecturer: Merlin Evans (Drawn to Medicine)

@drawntomedicine

• award-winning writer, illustrator of medicine with client list of Harley Street, Great Ormond Street Children\"s Hospital etc. House of illustration.
• Work in multiple contexts with a continuing theme of reporting or reportage
• Drawn to medicine is Merlin\"s business. Scribe/graphic recording artist for 13 to 15 years. Reporting to myself in error has helped. Reporting medically. Emotionally. Reporting mental health (eureka)
• Visually drawing live, performing, scribe/listens, pulling together the core themes of visible and key texts. Scribes this year that look different. Council report from community groups. 16 to 14-year-olds concerns about facility. Filling in complaints forms, designing buildings etc.  in Hackney.
• Patients how to shape healthcare solutions.
• System of reporting live for flexibility and play.
• Different styles and colour. How can people access in lockdown? Rough and ready. What a perfect layout, crammed. Imperfection to it.
• Unified style? Voice? I had a tight unified voice and style at the beginning of my practice but now I select according to the client.  Differs from loose to tight.
• No longer travelling with Posca pens and boards in bags. Created 21 A1 boards at Hampton Court Palace. In lockdown I\"m now on zoom calls.  I\"m not physically present. I upload photos of my work in the chat function as the conversation happens.
• Documentation of error and correction.
• I never thought to document everything, including errors, to show to a client before. It would sit in a sketchbook or in a folder. Who am I to say I\"ve selected the right piece of work in the end? What does the client think? I made worksheets of all of my inspirations. Documented all of my ideas.
• Working with Transport Federation. With different headings. Tricky concept to conceptualise and fully render. Decided to thumbnail and iterate. In a collaboration serving as a facilitator for another\"s ideas. Communication and message. 
• In fine Art, I\"m not hired to visualise anyone else\"s idea and be concerned if the message is communicated.
• I like to include iteration and error sheets in my portfolio. Agency over finished projects.
• I like to let the client do a bit of the work.
• I trained as a medical illustrator five or six years ago. Technical. Exams, restrictive, hyperrealistic illustration, painterly realism and Photoshop rendering. How can I bring my testimony to it?
• Teaching medics to be scribes. Very difficult. When is Student Medical and you might be given a complaint in text form. And example is given using illustration. There is a pilot to document the complaint using iconography and words. This saves time and can speed up the timeframe for helping a patient.
• In illustration as the complexity to simplicity. I\"ve worked with the UN using illustration as a tool,  complex legal document into design.
• Anatomy almost like a colouring book.
• Drawing the emotions and mental health using gestural movements
• Visual testimony fusion of acrylic mark making with digital mixed media patient quotes.
• Different materials – herbs a brush using it like a mop. Conveying waves of emotion moving into me. 
• And I want to take my work into the 3-D world
• I found out about scribing from a very young age and was then tagged doing it on Twitter as graphic recording and it grew from there
• For my mental health work  I like to use analog materials
• Why medical illustration? Health and sickness is the human condition. It\"s the most universal illustration.
• Use illustration to support ideas of accuracy. Talk to the users of the illustration. Why do you like this one?
• Arts can be used to combat dehumanisation if you\"re meeting resistance you\"re onto something
• Merlin shares her website Instagram and you can email her with any questions
• By drawing and visualising we are giving a platform and elevating meaning. Show up with your gift.
• VR Tech – niche and expensive. Oculus Quest was around £300, a risky purchase trying something new that could end up being my practice.  Have to consider the cost, the usability,how comfortable you are spending that sort of money, perhaps share the investment with friends so you can all use it and share it.
• I\"m very comfortable with making bad work and sharing bad work.

Reflection:

While I have no interest in the primary type of work that Merlin creates, specifically in the medical illustration field, what I do find fascinating is her  illustration work in relation to mental illness as I am doing something very similar myself with my 601 project so far. I also find her scribing, graphic recording and the idea of creating work in the moment very authentic and relatable as I do the same. I do not plan what I am going to make as it depends entirely on my mood at the time. 

Merlin came across as someone highly intelligent and is a very warm character and I would like to reach out to her with a few questions for my dissertation project especially in relation to the work she is creating with mental health I feel she can really strengthen my project.