Illustrated book · Textile installation · 2026
Role Reversal: Keeping Up with Pip
Role Reversal uses defamiliarisation to make the supposedly neutral systems of everyday life visible. Its illustrated story, Keeping Up with Pip, follows a Human Studies student through a society where Applers observe, label, display, and purchase human bodies.
Context
MA Illustration final project, Kingston University
Format
Illustrated picture book and wool-felt hanging work
Methods
Research-led illustration, character and world design, bookmaking, material experimentation
Framework
Role reversal, defamiliarisation, and the politics of the default standard
01
A world built on someone else’s standard
The project shifts humans from observer to observed. Inside the Human Museum, bodies become specimens and habitats; at the supermarket, body parts are labelled, discounted, and selected. Familiar systems become unsettling when their power changes hands.
02
Keeping Up with Pip
Pip is an ordinary Appler and a first-year Human Studies student. A simple day of museum research and grocery shopping becomes a quiet tour through the rules of this fictional society, with the picture-book sequence carrying the critique through character, setting, and repetition.
03
From page to material encounter
The current outcomes extend beyond the illustrated book into a large wool-felt hanging work. Bookmaking, painted felt, appliqué, stitching, and scale make the invented world tactile while keeping its systems of classification in view.
Complete project
Read the project in full
All 31 pages, grouped into chapters for web viewing.