Jiahao Ji

Research project: Reframing metaphors for experience remodelling: Can the co-creation of graphic narrative and visual metaphor support people' self-perception and care?

Abstract

This research is trying to develop an innovative visual methodology using visual metaphor in the graphic narrative to construct perception and cognition toward personal experience. Also, encourage narrative reconstruction to promote a positive experience of their life. Introducing co-creation in the narrative construction and reconstruction process and giving full play to artists' function, asking whether the co-creation between artist and client could develop a new intervention outside of a therapeutic setting, which can enable people to assuage anxiety comfortably in a daily routine and increases their capacity for self-management in a fun and engaging way which takes place. This practice-based research aims to result in a comic creation toolkit for people to express emotional status based on the methodology the procedures that guidance provided, a theoretical guidance for using visual metaphors and graphic narratives to support people's self-perception and care, and a publication as a visual archive of the whole research process. 

This research project will offer a new visual practice perspective on the combination of graphic medicine and narrative therapy. It will contribute to extending the graphic medicine creation approaches by developing a creative working process between the target client and illustrator and develop the pathography narrative's practicability and applicability. The practice can reach direct communication through art instead of creating a trigger. It tries to liberate comics from the professional art therapy field and serve not only as a communication tool but as an intervention tool in the audience's comprehension and cognition.