As someone who is fascinated by the relationship between the visual arts and literature, comics and graphic novels should be an obvious area of interest for me, yet strangely, until recently, they are something that I've never been particularly inspired to explore. However, I've begun to find myself increasingly intrigued by graphic novels and the way they bring together illustration, design and text to create a unique reading experience – and I’ve been educating myself with a course of Alan Moore, and lots of other classics of the genre.

Given this, I was keen to visit Hypercomics, a new exhibition exploring 'the shape of comics to come' curated by graphic novel expert Paul Gravett at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park. I also went along to hear his talk, ‘More than Words Can Say: The Future is Graphic’ exploring the different ways that comics are changing and developing into 21st century graphic literature.

I’m not really sure what exactly I expected from an exhibition of comics, but whatever it was, Hypercomics certainly wasn't it. These are comics with a difference: four artists have experimented with non-linear narratives, liberating the comic from the printed page, offering us a series of works that present us with multiple storylines and multiple perspectives. More installation art than comic book, all the works are inspired by the space of the Pump House Gallery itself, using the building and its architecture as the catalyst for a shifting story which changes depending on how we as the viewer choose to interact with and move through the spaces.

This is most obvious in ‘The Rut’, the installation created by comic artist Dave McKean, who is perhaps best-known for his collaborations with Neil Gaiman. Here, McKean presents a menacing story of an assault in Battersea Park through a combination of drawing, sculpture, photography and installation, told through the eyes of three different characters and which can be read in a multiplicity of different ways. Meanwhile, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey re-imagines the Pump House Gallery as an archive for the fictional glam-rock dictator Hieronymous Pop, documenting the life of its lone archivist in a series of Chris Ware-style panels that offer us multi-directional storylines and diverging possibilities.

Adam Dant’s work on the mezzanine level presents the most overt challenge to conventional narrative, in an installation that I found difficult to relate to any kind of traditional comic format. Here, the gallery becomes the tromp l’oeil library of a sinister character called ‘Doctor London’: the walls are covered with painted bookcases housing arcane ‘corpo-geographic’ volumes with titles such as ‘The Great Lobe of Theatreland’ and ‘Chronic Wheezing: a description of some sounds of Finsbury’, reconfiguring the city of London as a diseased body. The ground floor of the gallery was set up for the talk, so to my disappointment I didn’t have much chance to look at the fourth work in the show, Warren Pleece’s animated installation ‘Montague Terrace’, a work that allows gallery visitors to take a Rear Window-style peep into the lives of four dysfunctional tenants of the Pump House Gallery re-visioned as an apartment block.

Proving that comic books and contemporary art have more in common than I, at least, could ever have expected, Hypercomics is a vibrant and enjoyable exhibition, but also highly thought-provoking about the nature of narrative fiction. Taking the blurred boundaries between visual art and literature that already exist within the graphic novel format to a new level, this is an exhibition which experiments with ideas of immersivity and interactivity, allowing the viewer to become the author of their own unique narrative. What's more, in a world where digital publishing occupies an increasing level of our attention, this exhibition is a timely celebration of the comic as a tactile object, offering us a physical space to investigate, interact with and explore.

[Image by Warren Pleece: Detail from Montague Terrace, via Pump House Gallery]

The De Vegh Twins, 1975

Alice Neel: Painted Truths, currently showing at the Whitechapel Art Gallery is a challenging exhibition to put into words: Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian sums it up well as 'exhilarating, touching and a bit wild' but thinking over this powerful body of work, the word that returns to me more than any other is 'unflinching'.

Credited with challenging the conventions of portraiture, Alice Neel is perhaps best known for painting many of the artists, poets and radicals of her day - portraits of Andy Warhol and Frank O'Hara are amongst those in this retrospective. However, as this exhibition makes clear, her art also depicts a range of subjects usually excluded from mainstream portraiture - the elderly, pregnant women, families from Harlem's immigrant communities, a Fuller Brush salesman, a child clutching a cat.

These works are often highly exaggerated, sometimes even grotesque: Neel's subjects are represented in bold brush strokes and florid colours, with spindly long-fingered hands, fixing the viewer with wide, troubling eyes. Yet in spite of this almost cartoon-like exaggeration and distortion, there is a profound honesty in Neel's work. Her subjects are depicted in all their wonky awkwardness: scarred, saggy, abject, uneasy. Often highly unflattering, these are also tender, touching paintings that expose the vulnerabilities and anxieties of her subjects - portraits made powerful by their psychological, if not representational truth.

This sensitively-curated exhibition focuses predominantly upon portraiture structuring Neel's work with a series of themes including Portraits and Memory, Nudes and the Detached Gaze; yet some of my favourite works here are in fact cityscapes: portraits of Neel's New York. These range from jaunty images of New York street architecture executed with an unusual lightness of touch, through to darker and more troubled works which hint at the aftermath of the Depression, but also Neel's own sense of herself as a woman restricted and confined within a domestic environment. Neel's involvement with New York and its artistic and radical communities becomes a thread that runs through this exhibition, which also references the events of her life, from early tragedies (in her early twenties she lost one daughter to diphtheria and another in a custody battle with her first husband), and subsequent breakdowns, to poverty, failing relationships, but ultimately, towards the end of her life, her rising fortunes as an artist.

9th Avenue, 1935

Although Neel is often represented as something of an iconoclast, what interested me about many of these works was their references to the tradition of painting, evoking everyone from Van Gogh to Cezanne to Edward Hopper. Night, one of my favourite paintings in the exhibition, and certainly amongst the most understated, recalls the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still; whilst Dead Father seems reminiscent of the work of Marc Chagall. Yet regardless of style, what unites this formidable and varied body of work is its honesty. It is the sheer frankness, the unflinching directness of Neel's 'painted truths' that makes them so exhilarating - and ultimately gives them their power.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths is at the Whitechapel until 17 September.

A couple of things happened yesterday that got me thinking. The first was that the very nice people at Central Station featured Follow the Yellow Brick Road in the Spotted column of their online bulletin, alongside some great Manchester artists and projects. The link reads: discover top cultural commentary on events taking place in Manchester in this blog by Katherine Woodfine. Lovely. But when I clicked through on the link, I realised with shame that I hadn't actually written anything about Manchester since February. Oops.

Seeking a diversion, I turned to my Twitter feed (ah, Twitter, ever an endless source of distraction) where I spotted that the nominations for this year's Manchester Blog Awards are now open. I started thinking about which of my many favourite Manchester blogs I was going to nominate - and then suddenly realised that for the first time since I started writing it, my own blog wouldn't be eligible. I don't live in commuting distance of Manchester and now I've finished my Masters, I'm not even studying there anymore. The last time I even went to Manchester was.... months ago. And that's when it hit me: I live in London now.

Perhaps that might sound pretty obvious: after all I've been here for over a year. But when I first moved down to London, I really felt I had a foot in both camps. I was still still coming up to Manchester often for dissertation supervision meetings, and readings, and to see friends, and to go to exhibitions. Being in London felt very temporary and I was thinking of myself as a sort of jet-setting hybrid, part-Manchester, part-London: in transit, or as I believe Creative Tourist put it so aptly, 'flitting between the two'.

But I can no longer claim to be a part-time Londoner. I have a full time job here; I have friends; I have a flat, and mysteriously (in spite of my original decision to leave most of my stuff in my mum's jam-packed attic and lead a more minimal existence) have acquired enough stuff to fill it with, including several shelves-worth of books. I know the best ways to cycle to places on my bike, the short-cuts down the back streets. I have favourite places to eat. I know where previously unknown locations like Crouch End and Herne Hill and Walthamstow are; and what's more, I've become one of those London people who is always enthusiastically comparing boring details of their commute with people they meet. I've even stopped calling it That London, except in a sort of jolly self-deprecating fashion when talking to people who live elsewhere. And though I still go north regularly, it's usually to stay with my mum up in Lancaster, rather than to visit Manchester anymore.

I still can't see myself living in London forever - in my view it's a great place to be for a couple of years before you move on. Yes, the public transport may be amazing, and it always seems to be sunny, and there are loads of restaurants and galleries and interesting places to go to, but I'm sure after a while that all that will pale beside my insatiable need for wet walks on windswept moors, steak and kidney pudding with chips and gravy, and conversations with other people who call a cup of tea 'a brew' and who know what the word 'mither' means. And who knows, perhaps before very long I'll end up back in Manchester. But for the moment I think I'll have to hold my hands up and admit to it: right now, I'm a Londoner.

So what does that mean for Follow the Yellow Brick Road? It's a good question. Because much as there are are a million and one exhibitions and literature events to go to here in London, one thing I've noticed is that the arts scene here feels strangely impenetrable. I miss the friendliness of Manchester's arts scene and that sense of belonging. The brilliant hubs of cultural activity that exist in Manchester that open things up to everyone and make connections between people - like the Manchester Blog Awards and Creative Tourist, like Kate Feld's Manchizzle blog or over in Leeds, the Culture Vulture - just don't seem to exist here in quite the same way, or at least if they do, I'm yet to discover them. And though I'm always excited by new exhibitions and things I want to see (right now, Alice Neel and the new Jake & Dinos Chapman children's commission at the Whitechapel), I'm still equally excited, often even more excited, by all the great things that are going on in the north. This autumn, for example, I can't wait to check out Manchester Literature Festival, the Liverpool Biennial, AND festival, the Northern Art Prize... I could go on. The idea of not being in the north, not writing about the north makes me feel incredibly sad.

That's why in the end, what this really comes down to is nothing more than a teeny tiny edit in the blog description, up there in the top right hand corner of the screen. That extra word... um... "sometimes" (bet you're glad you bothered to read the whole of this blog post now, aren't you?) Or then again, on the other hand, I suppose you could say it comes down to a whole lot more.

I struggle to put it into words, so instead I'm going to leave you with a link to something else: Lydia Unsworth's winning story about Manchester from the Rain Never Stops Play short story competition run by Creative Tourist and Rainy City stories, which I read for the first time this evening. Somehow she manages to express all this far better than I can: The City is Leaving Me. Or perhaps, while I wasn't noticing, it had already left...

So this is what's been keeping me so busy recently that I've had little time for writing. The Shape Game project is something I've been working on as part of my work with the Children's Laureate Anthony Browne, and this new book (above) was launched on Monday.

If you haven't heard of the Shape Game before, it's basically a collaborative drawing game. Anthony Browne explains it as follows:

'The rules of the Shape Game are very simple: the first player quickly draws any abstract shape at random, the second looks at it and then transforms it into something recognisable. It could be anything – a face, a dinosaur or a fried egg. It could be a doodle or a work of art.

'When we were children, my brother Michael and I thought this game was our invention, but having spoken to children all over the world, I have since discovered that children everywhere know it and play their own versions. The wonderful thing about the Shape Game is that anyone with a little bit of imagination can join in.

'As Children’s Laureate, I want to help and connect with children everywhere, and encourage them to use their imaginations and be creative. Although it’s just a simple game, I believe the Shape Game is the perfect way to do this. It encapsulates the act of creativity – inspiration is everywhere. I have played the Shape Game in every single book I have made, and now you have the chance to join in and play it, too!'

As part of the project, 45 writers, artists, illustrators and celebrities - ranging from Quentin Blake and Shirley Hughes to Emma Thompson and Harry Hill - joined Anthony to play the game, transforming a shape he drew. You can see some of my favourites amongst the artworks below or look at a gallery on the Guardian website here. All the artworks have been published in the new Play the Shape Game book which we have been working on with the wonderful Walker Books, and which aims to help all children to be creative and use their imaginations. They're also for sale until Sunday in an online auction.

Profits from the book and auction will be donated to children's charity Rainbow Trust, who provide vital emotional and practical support to families who have a child with a life-threatening or terminal illness. You can find loads more about the project on the Children's Laureate website here.

Quentin Blake

Shirley Hughes


Jan Pienkowski

Sir Peter Blake

The idea of the traditional summer 'village fete' - which I remember well from childhood summers in an actual village - seems to have been well and truly reclaimed by London's hipsters. Summer in London is replete with ironic village fetes, complete with everything from bunting to tombolas to home-made cakes, from the Innocent Village Fete in Regent's Park to the V&A's annual Summer Fete.

So it was with this weekend's Shoreditch Festival, which saw the usually somewhat dingy space of Shoreditch Park transformed into a multi-coloured extravaganza of fun - yet pleasingly, this free, family-friendly festival didn't overdo the irony, and so managed to retain some of the good-natured community atmosphere of a real, old-fashioned summer fete, albeit one reinvented for an urban East London audience, complete with jazzy pigeon-themed branding.

Some of my highlights from my afternoon stroll around the festival grounds were: lemon-yellow cupcakes and tea; Buster Keaton films on the big screen; children's books (what else?) on sale from the excellent Victoria Park bookshop; guinea pigs, rabbits and chickens courtesy of Hackney City Farm; children bouncing on huge cushions on the Spoken Word tent, in between playing drawing games with Children's Laureate Anthony Browne; Mr Wonderful's Tea Dance; and especially the ace Shoreditch Bark Dog Show which featured some exceptionally cute dogs completing for titles such as Most Glamorous, and Best Tail-Wagging. (Now I bet that's something that wasn't on the line up at ATP or Latitude...)

[Image via Shoreditch Festival]

I'm sure I'm not the only one whose childhood bookshelves (and, um, present day ones for that matter) were absolutely stuffed with books published by Puffin. One of my best ever birthday presents was a box-set of Puffin Classics which I remember reading one after the other practically without stopping to eat or sleep; and I still recall the crushing disappointment of writing off to join the Puffin Club and discovering that it had stopped running in 1983 - coincidentally the year I was born.*

It's probably no surprise, then, that my visit this week to Newcastle for the launch of a new exhibition celebrating 70 years of Puffin Books at the wonderful Seven Stories was something of a nostalgia trip. There's Nuffin Like a Puffin isn't merely an exhibition about books, but about old and wonderful friends - from The Children Who Lived in the Barn and The Borrowers through to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Worst Witch and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I could happily have spent hours walking around, following the frieze of friendly and familiar Puffin book spines around the gallery, looking at all the fascinating material on display. Much of this comes from the Kaye Webb archive - Webb of course being the hugely influential chief editor of Puffin Books from 1961 to 1979, who was the first to publish authors and illustrators including Roald Dahl and Raymond Briggs. This archival material includes everything from editions of the Puffin Post newsletter through to annotated manuscripts, original illustrations, authors' notes and personal correspondence right down to a little card from Tove Jansson to apologise for the delay in finishing her latest Moomin book, complete with a tiny drawing of Little My.

Judging by the big, beaming grins at all the other faces at the exhibition launch, I wasn't the only one enjoying myself - and I don't think it was just the pink cakes and ginger beer served at lunch that had everyone feeling so jolly. As Kate Edwards, Chief Executive of Seven Stories, aptly pointed out: "Anyone growing up in Britain will, at some time or another, have read, enjoyed or even fallen in love with a Puffin Book." Perhaps for this reason, There's Nuffin Like a Puffin feels like an incredibly personal exhibition, engaging everyone in a different way - for me it was the original black and white illustrations from Ballet Shoes (Pauline and Petrova in their white organdie dresses) that were especially moving, whilst for others it might well be Worzel Gummidge, or Gobbolino the Witch's Cat.

However, as well as being a a wonderful and nostalgic experience for adults, this is also a hugely fun exhibition for children to enjoy - well, not even just for children really, but for all those who are up for doing things like watching sweet animations (see above), dressing up as a Puffin, crawling inside Stig of the Dump's cave, making magic spells in Meg and Mog's magical cauldron, or playing Mr Big's piano- and if you stand very, very still, you might even spot a Borrower or two!

Conclusions? Highly recommended - there truly is Nuffin Like a Puffin. What's more, if you should go to see it, there's also a lovely Lauren Child exhibition showing in the other gallery, as well as some of my favourite Brian Wildsmith in the Book Den. Hurrah for children's books! Now hand me my ginger beer...

* Fortunately the Famous Five Club was still in operation, but that, as they say, is another story...

I came upon Sandra Dieckmann's beautiful artwork recently via the excellent Culture Vulture website. She recently designed them a new banner, and you can read their interview with her here.



Sandra is a London-based illustrator, whose work deftly blends drawing, collage and photographic elements, which come together in quirky scenes often featuring slightly surreal animal characters. I especially love how she combines her colourful artwork with text and storytelling elements, which give her lively illustrations an extra dimension - Sandra herself says "my head is full of stories and creatures and conversations. I can't be any other way." It's no surprise then that she's also the creator of illustrated children's stories, including her book 'The Bumble Bear and the Grizzly Bee' (see above) which you can read more about on Pikaland here.

Sandra is also the originator of some lovely collaborative online illustration projects. Haus Stories invites artists and illustrators to make a contribution to an ever-expanding house in a kind of ongoing illustrator's game of Jenga:


Meanwhile, If I Was You is described as "an illustrated story that connects in a linear way and at the same time manages to bring together different ways of working." Beginning with Sandra herself, a series of artists take it in turns to respond to the previous persons work, by responding to the prompt 'If I was you...'


Visit Sandra's website to find out more about her work and projects here!

[All images via Sandra Dieckmann]