Output details

Eight illustrations, 'Comment and Debate' column, The Guardian

These illustrations represent the culmination of Hickey’s research in response to the changing role of illustrators in an era of digitisation and the consequent radical collapse of time surrounding daily newspaper production and associated editorial illustration. Opportunities resulting from introduction of The Guardian’s new Berliner format in 2005, and parallel growth of its use of editorial illustration, enabled Hickey to explore the potential of working at unprecedented speed, and in a manner that embraced the instantaneity of reception characterising 21st century consumption of newspaper content. The timescale of production – a four hour turnaround from first receipt of written copy to the production of finished art work – acted as the underpinning determinant in his research and resulted in development of an increasingly pared back approach to image making.

The research developed from Hickey’s first, 2007 ‘Comment and Debate’ commission, when an illustration responding to contrasting commentaries on the 50th anniversary of the 6-day Arab-Israeli war had rapidly to be rethought following their last minute replacement by a polemic advocating the return of American troops from Iraq (by then US Senator, Barack Obama). Hickey recognised his resultant image – which rested on two elements and a highly limited colour palette – as offering a newly incisive approach; this he then honed in eight subsequent ‘Comment and Debate’ images made between January and July 2008. With a screenprint aesthetic, his own ‘image library’ and the scanner as ‘tools’, subsequent illustrations rested on the incisive juxtaposition or dialogue between elements to achieve visual irony, metaphor and symbolism. Apparently perverse omission of human figures in the majority of cases was integral to images’ productive work as visual counterpoints to the written texts with which they interacted and the underpinning address of human society to which the ‘Comment and Debate’ section is dedicated.