academic profile

I joined the BA (Hons) Illustration course at the University of Portsmouth in 2018, where I teach across Levels 4 to 6 and contribute to studio-based learning, seminars and workshops. I coordinate Level 5 modules Professional Skills Development and Book Arts. Within the School, I co-manage the Ministry of Books - a unique artists’ books archive and collection that supports student research and practice across disciplines.

research interests

My research activity encompasses illustration practice, drawing as research method, and the artist’s book as a vehicle for material and conceptual enquiry. I have presented papers and posters at international illustration symposia including Apparatus: The Role of Technology in Illustration (15th International Illustration Research Symposium) and the Illustration and the Paper Artefact poster at Falmouth University, and regularly contribute to research outputs integrating creative artefacts and exhibition-based projects.

pITCH : PUNCH : PRINT
Academic poster FOR 14th Annual International Illustration Conference (2024)

My poster is about the possibilities of creating new layers of heritage within our work as illustrators. Using layered imagery, text, colour, texture, and themes, I will put forward insights and invitations from my practice-based research into finding new layers of meaning and potential in traditional and often obsolete methods of artistic production including the mechanical embroidery loom, mechanical music box and multiplane animation rostrum. I present these as ongoing active processes including designing and making artists’ books in collaboration and community; experiments with layering for the risograph printing process during off-timetable Riso Club sessions for University of Portsmouth illustration students; my development of multiplane camera rostrum kits to support students in the creation of multi-layered materials (collage and offcuts) for stopframe animation; facilitating workshops for students to create tunnel books, dioramas, and paper-engineering experiments; and exploring the heritage of textile machinery.

BOOKS WITH DEPTH:
​Printable templates for artists' books in illustration education
ACADEMIC POSTER FOR Illustration & The Paper Artefact Symposium (2025)

​Held at Falmouth in September 2025, this symposium asked how the materiality of paper shapes illustration historically, aesthetically, socially and environmentally.

My poster, Books with Depth, presented how printable templates developed in response to remote teaching constraints, each modelling a book structure: folds, three-dimensional forms, stitched bindings, interactive mechanics, paper engineering, and forms beyond the book such as augmented reality and sound.

​Drawn as architectural blueprint, the templates work as portable, democratic design systems, letting book arts travel easily across other disciplines such as Architecture, Graphic Design, Photography, Creative Writing and Animation.

Illustration Beyond the Page:
Mechanical Music, Artists' Books & Sound Weaving
Abstract, Presentation & paper for 15th International Illustration research symposium:
​apparatus: the role of technology in illustration (2025)

​This paper extends work from the 15th Symposium, Apparatus: The Role of Technology in Illustration, developing its claim: perforated media is both material and conceptual device, bound up with controlling the machines it addresses. Drawing on media archaeology, I trace a lineage from textile through the Jacquard loom, pianola roll and barrel organ strip to digital code and back to the hand-held paper object. My contribution is Tapestry Sound Book, where 626 figures traced from the Bayeux Tapestry become punch positions playable through a 15-note music box.

Thinking Through Making: Problem finding (in-progress)

Lee Shearman
Lecturer in Illustration

Jac Batey
Associate Professor in Illustration

This exhibition brought together elements of the collaborative practices of Jac Batey and Lee Shearman exploring how drawing, printing, binding, and display can operate as intertwined methods of research. Through experimental book structures, bespoke templates, and documented making processes, the project investigates how artists’ books function as dynamic, performative forms of illustration

At the centre of the work is an inquiry into materiality, constraint, and narrative: How does a book’s structure – its folds, bindings, layers and mechanisms – shape the ideas it carries? What new possibilities surface when illustrators adopt or rework book-arts methods? And how might restriction through spatial limitation foster rather than limit creative exploration?

The exhibition also examines the role of display and documentation in expanding the experience of book works. Video documentation reveals the construction of artists’ books TapestryTapestry and Piano LessonsPiano Lessons, highlighting the processes, decisions, and craft behind the work.
Physical models, sketchbooks, prototypes, and devices of display demonstrate how book structures can be reimagined as spatial, tactile, and temporal illustrations. 

This work proposes a view of illustration as an embodied, material, and pedagogical practice, where making becomes a way of uncovering questions, generating insight, and testing ideas through action. 
​
Batey and Shearman’s collaborative bookwork Morass is a response to Charles Dickens’s quotes about avarice. The work imagines the language of greed beginning in the Bank of England, before moving down through a fictional underground railway and then downwards still further into a version of Hell.
Exhibition Poster

BA ILLUSTRATION PORTSMOUTH FILM CLUB (2024)
​90 years of animation (1908 - 1998)

This is a speculative poster I designed for a planned film programme of selected experimental animations from 20th Century

THE ANIMATION OF RUFF MERCY
A Selection of shorts from animator russ murphy

This is a speculative poster I designed for a planned film programme of selected experimental animations from animator Russ Murphy.