ARTIST INTERVIEW
Mnemonic Objects:
Illustration as a Practice of Remembering and Reframing History
Illustration as a Practice of Remembering and Reframing History
Sharpay Chenyue Yuan talks to Serena Katt about the way walking, drawing, and archives intersect in her evolving methodology
28 Oct 2025
28 Oct 2025
Serena Katt retraces the past by walking, drawing, and reimagining histories that are both personal and collective. Her work begins from intimate connections—family stories, environments shaped by memory, and traces of geography that hold emotional weight. In all cases, she positions herself centrally in the research process, blurring the line between self-ethnography and visual storytelling.
INTERVIEW
— Your practice involve retracing the past through acts of walking, drawing, and reimagining. How do you see illustration functioning as a way of engaging with embodied memory and difficult history?
— I see them as almost two different things. Working with embodied memory is a new aspect of my practice, and comes from introducing methods such as walking as a methodology. It also comes from a slow move towards layering my own experiences as a researcher into the work – making them visible to a reader, but also to think about what happens to me physically when I’m researching, and how to show that. As a result, I’ve been focusing a lot on the physical, bodily function of image making. It’s a new consideration for me to consider myself as being embodied as a maker, putting myself – my body – into situations, and seeing what happens, what the experience is, and how it can be translated into image or sequence - and so I still don’t have an accurate description of the process. Of course it’s an imprecise method – nothing is quantifiable – which works in the context of my practice and what I am attempting to achieve. In teaching, I think about this in commercial settings as well, especially in the age of AI and digital image-making: what is it that we, as illustrators, bring to the table? One aspect is our physicality – the fact that when we’re making images, our bodies are involved in that process.
With difficult histories, the idea of (re)tracing has become central to my practice over the years – meaning drawing multiple versions of the same image – to distill it, as well as to emphasize the distortions that occur through this process. At the ‘Colouring in: The Past’ conference, Catherine Anyango Grünewald described drawing as being an act that can allow us to bring back voice and attention to a subject – particularly with regard to undervalued stories and histories – that drawing, in particular, can imbue a subject with a sense of importance, of value, and that the time spent by the maker on this process carries a weight. I am similarly interested in where I want to place attention, and give emphasis. When I look into difficult histories and spend time drawing them, I suppose I’m asking myself and my viewers to look again, and perhaps to look differently.
With difficult histories, the idea of (re)tracing has become central to my practice over the years – meaning drawing multiple versions of the same image – to distill it, as well as to emphasize the distortions that occur through this process. At the ‘Colouring in: The Past’ conference, Catherine Anyango Grünewald described drawing as being an act that can allow us to bring back voice and attention to a subject – particularly with regard to undervalued stories and histories – that drawing, in particular, can imbue a subject with a sense of importance, of value, and that the time spent by the maker on this process carries a weight. I am similarly interested in where I want to place attention, and give emphasis. When I look into difficult histories and spend time drawing them, I suppose I’m asking myself and my viewers to look again, and perhaps to look differently.
Working with specifically sourced reference imagery, imagery which has often already been imbued with a web of connotations, symbolism, and motives, provides a visual richness, and a clear root in reality
— In your projects, you value the depth of emotional understanding in both your approaches of photography/archive and fieldwork. Could you share a bit about how your methodology shifts across different projects?
— Sunday’s Child was very much focused on the use of carefully sourced images — family photographs alongside public national archives from Germany, as well as smaller online collections. Working with specifically sourced reference imagery, imagery which has often already been imbued with a web of connotations, symbolism, and motives, provides a visual richness, and a clear root in reality, that I was interested in responding to and capturing. I also conducted a couple of site visits to two distinct places which were historically significant to the Hitler Youth. These weren’t fundamental to what I was doing, but they allowed me to gain a larger sense of context. During these visits I became particularly focused on my experience of the architecture in these spaces, and gained a physical understanding of what these places were like, on a human scale. This, in turn, allowed me to add more atmosphere and emotion into the final illustrations. At a later stage in the work, my later methodology really came to be using the process of sequencing as a way of communication. Another integral part was in considering how text can add additional layers of meaning.
— Sunday’s Child was very much focused on the use of carefully sourced images — family photographs alongside public national archives from Germany, as well as smaller online collections. Working with specifically sourced reference imagery, imagery which has often already been imbued with a web of connotations, symbolism, and motives, provides a visual richness, and a clear root in reality, that I was interested in responding to and capturing. I also conducted a couple of site visits to two distinct places which were historically significant to the Hitler Youth. These weren’t fundamental to what I was doing, but they allowed me to gain a larger sense of context. During these visits I became particularly focused on my experience of the architecture in these spaces, and gained a physical understanding of what these places were like, on a human scale. This, in turn, allowed me to add more atmosphere and emotion into the final illustrations. At a later stage in the work, my later methodology really came to be using the process of sequencing as a way of communication. Another integral part was in considering how text can add additional layers of meaning.
'Walking with Inge'
Serena Katt: "In May of 1945, my German Grandmother Inge began the start of a 800km journey to return home to Hamburg, from a small town in Czechoslovakia. The journey took three months, mostly on foot, accompanied by her 18-month old daughter, and was undertaken when she was heavily pregnant with her second child. In the summer of 2022, I followed her journey, using her detailed documentation of this time as a guide. Travelling mostly on foot, my own journey took 21 days."
— Walking with Inge is still in progress, and is based on a research trip that I conducted in 2022. The initial idea was to follow the exact route of a journey my Grandmother took in 1945, which was meticulously documented in letters that she wrote at a later date. She was a German refugee, needing to return to Germany from the Czech Republic – a dangerous and difficult journey, which she captured in vivid detail. I used that text as the source to follow the same journey as her, carrying a sketchbook, camera and laptop, to document as much as possible of my experiences over three weeks, and to see if I could find traces of the places she had been in.
My process now is about finding ways of curating this research, as well as turning it into form that has a clearly understandable narrative thread. It is a delicate balance of trying to stay close to the ‘truth’ of the images and words captured on route, and adding information or visuals that create a cohesive experience for a reader. As I outlined above, I have become more and more interested in making myself, as the researcher, visible in the work – and in really highlighting the process of researching itself as a core part of the narrative. I think this continues this idea of embodied research and embodied illustration. It also allows me to work with history in a manner where there isn’t a finite answer—what emerges is, hopefully, more nuanced, layered, and multifaceted.
Monuments grew out of some drawings I was producing during the early days of the pandemic, when I couldn’t go anywhere. I used Google Street View to visit different places, and soon began to focus on how historical sites, and our contemplation of them, were being captured in this digital sphere. I had already written a text that encapsulated my feelings around the difference between public memorialization, in particular within Germany and in the UK — the two nations that I’m connected to by birth and by heritage – and began to work with this as a rough basis for choosing which sites to focus on. My digital site visits allowed me to contemplate specific monuments, as well as the people captured looking at them. I produced a wide range of drawings, which I later edited to form the final sequence. I found myself particularly drawn to the images on Street View that had been made and uploaded by other users, and became interested in the performative aspect of documenting oneself in a site that carries a lot of historical weight. This became the start of a real fascination with how our engagement with historical sites is rapidly changing - how it is increasingly mediated digitally, even when we are simultaneously connecting to a place physically.
My process now is about finding ways of curating this research, as well as turning it into form that has a clearly understandable narrative thread. It is a delicate balance of trying to stay close to the ‘truth’ of the images and words captured on route, and adding information or visuals that create a cohesive experience for a reader. As I outlined above, I have become more and more interested in making myself, as the researcher, visible in the work – and in really highlighting the process of researching itself as a core part of the narrative. I think this continues this idea of embodied research and embodied illustration. It also allows me to work with history in a manner where there isn’t a finite answer—what emerges is, hopefully, more nuanced, layered, and multifaceted.
Monuments grew out of some drawings I was producing during the early days of the pandemic, when I couldn’t go anywhere. I used Google Street View to visit different places, and soon began to focus on how historical sites, and our contemplation of them, were being captured in this digital sphere. I had already written a text that encapsulated my feelings around the difference between public memorialization, in particular within Germany and in the UK — the two nations that I’m connected to by birth and by heritage – and began to work with this as a rough basis for choosing which sites to focus on. My digital site visits allowed me to contemplate specific monuments, as well as the people captured looking at them. I produced a wide range of drawings, which I later edited to form the final sequence. I found myself particularly drawn to the images on Street View that had been made and uploaded by other users, and became interested in the performative aspect of documenting oneself in a site that carries a lot of historical weight. This became the start of a real fascination with how our engagement with historical sites is rapidly changing - how it is increasingly mediated digitally, even when we are simultaneously connecting to a place physically.
'Monuments'
A short physical comic, reflecting on the ways in which nations remember in public spaces.
Many gaps in the historical narratives I work with are of course filled with historical research, but then the fictional lens then allows me to add a human, emotive, dimension.
— You mentioned that ‘the presence of an author can also be illustration’s strength’ — in your practice, you blur the line between fiction and testimony, the imagined and the inherited. Could you share how you navigate this interplay, and how your own presence as an author shapes the way these narratives are (re)constructed?
— I think fiction, or slight fictionalisation of something real, allows for me as the author to find more access to my subject. Emotional understanding is important for creating understanding in a reader, or at least I believe it to be. Many gaps in the historical narratives I work with are of course filled with historical research, but then the fictional lens then allows me to add a human, emotive, dimension.
In terms of how my own presence as an author shapes the way these narratives are being (re)constructed, I have gradually I've come to understand that I can’t detach myself as an author within the work. I think the inclusion of the self can also give a bit more nuance to the telling of a story. It means that I'm not trying to come to a definitive position on a particular history, instead I aim to outline that this is my response to this history, or this experience – and to make that visible to a reader. It also gives space for other people to imbue their own ideas, thoughts or questions into those same narratives, meaning that – at least in part – they go on that journey with me.
I think, in a fundamental way, most of my work is about attempting to understand things that we cannot truly understand. Certainly it’s a theme that I keep returning to in my work – a question of knowing there will be no definitive answers, and questioning how I can approach learning about a subject in a way that remains multifaceted, and not definitive.
— I think fiction, or slight fictionalisation of something real, allows for me as the author to find more access to my subject. Emotional understanding is important for creating understanding in a reader, or at least I believe it to be. Many gaps in the historical narratives I work with are of course filled with historical research, but then the fictional lens then allows me to add a human, emotive, dimension.
In terms of how my own presence as an author shapes the way these narratives are being (re)constructed, I have gradually I've come to understand that I can’t detach myself as an author within the work. I think the inclusion of the self can also give a bit more nuance to the telling of a story. It means that I'm not trying to come to a definitive position on a particular history, instead I aim to outline that this is my response to this history, or this experience – and to make that visible to a reader. It also gives space for other people to imbue their own ideas, thoughts or questions into those same narratives, meaning that – at least in part – they go on that journey with me.
I think, in a fundamental way, most of my work is about attempting to understand things that we cannot truly understand. Certainly it’s a theme that I keep returning to in my work – a question of knowing there will be no definitive answers, and questioning how I can approach learning about a subject in a way that remains multifaceted, and not definitive.
— In your work, you often narrate from a first-person perspective, situating your own family stories within broader historical contexts. How do you view the significance of using the first person in storytelling, and why does it feel particularly important in your practice?
— It feels particularly key in the work where I am working with family stories, because it’s important for a reader to know that I have a connection to those histories. I’m not looking at them in the abstract, but from the perspective that these are my histories. I don't think that this gives me a vastly different viewpoint on what I'm looking at, but there's something about it that carries weight for me as an author – much of which I’ve maybe just outlined in answer to other questions.
As a researcher, thinking about embodied processes, or on-site research of any kind, you’re also always positioning yourself quite centrally into the process of responding to or engaging with a certain environment. That’s a part of the first-person perspective, too. So far, I would say that the emphasis in my work has been mainly about environment or place, and the idea of relating to space and geography in different ways.
As a researcher, thinking about embodied processes, or on-site research of any kind, you’re also always positioning yourself quite centrally into the process of responding to or engaging with a certain environment. That’s a part of the first-person perspective, too. So far, I would say that the emphasis in my work has been mainly about environment or place, and the idea of relating to space and geography in different ways.
Sharpay Yuan:
— You mentioned that fieldwork and embodied on-site experience will take on a more central role in your upcoming work, which contrasts with your prior graphic novel Sunday's Child, where you didn’t bring your field trips into the narrative. Could you share a bit about how you envision this shift shaping the tone, narration, and overall identity of the new project?
— When I proposed the project, Walking with Inge, I wrote about wanting to produce an experience that I was then going to respond to through a series of mnemonic objects. Looking back, it was almost about repeating the same process that my grandmother went through when she documented her journey – in the sense of experiencing something, and then putting the experience into a form that was recognizable and understandable by people that came later. For her, that form was writing (she wrote the letters, which are incredibly detailed, once she had returned from her trip). For me my medium is drawing, but writing also comes into it in terms of providing a structure.
Part of the process, then, was to create an uncontrollable and unpredictable experience for myself, putting myself into specific places connected to her experience, but without much further planning, in order to see what happened. Afterwards, the work has then been about working from my own memories - not being physically in the spaces anymore and instead responding to whatever experiences were still alive in me.
My current process is a deepened exploration of the individual sites I visited (which were many!) as well as the interconnecting journeys to get from one to the next. So I am working with the photographs I took, as well as using Google street view to actually move back through digitized versions of those spaces in order to get different visual reference points for my drawings. This means I am moving through a digitized representation of a specific physical space, which is also attached to my own memory of being there. I find it philosophically interesting that I'm underlining this experience and these histories over and over again - a mnemonic exercise that strengthens the memory, a process which initially is more for me than my viewer. But in making, it also becomes for the viewer. There’s a distillation process that takes place here - but I find it hard to say in these early stages of the project, what the results that are truly going to be for a viewer.
I'm now at a point where I am shaping it into something that’s understandable and easy to navigate by a reader – probably a graphic novel of sorts, as this allows for a shaping of linear narrative in a way that works for what I am trying to achieve. It is a process that involves editing, artistic license, metaphor and allegory, the use of narrative structure, pace and all of these things. I guess it’s a process of turning an experience into something that ultimately, I might describe as the ‘mnemonic object’ I had first set out to produce initially: something that holds and contains responses and references to memory and to the past – or that becomes a touchstone for a specific experience.
Part of the process, then, was to create an uncontrollable and unpredictable experience for myself, putting myself into specific places connected to her experience, but without much further planning, in order to see what happened. Afterwards, the work has then been about working from my own memories - not being physically in the spaces anymore and instead responding to whatever experiences were still alive in me.
My current process is a deepened exploration of the individual sites I visited (which were many!) as well as the interconnecting journeys to get from one to the next. So I am working with the photographs I took, as well as using Google street view to actually move back through digitized versions of those spaces in order to get different visual reference points for my drawings. This means I am moving through a digitized representation of a specific physical space, which is also attached to my own memory of being there. I find it philosophically interesting that I'm underlining this experience and these histories over and over again - a mnemonic exercise that strengthens the memory, a process which initially is more for me than my viewer. But in making, it also becomes for the viewer. There’s a distillation process that takes place here - but I find it hard to say in these early stages of the project, what the results that are truly going to be for a viewer.
I'm now at a point where I am shaping it into something that’s understandable and easy to navigate by a reader – probably a graphic novel of sorts, as this allows for a shaping of linear narrative in a way that works for what I am trying to achieve. It is a process that involves editing, artistic license, metaphor and allegory, the use of narrative structure, pace and all of these things. I guess it’s a process of turning an experience into something that ultimately, I might describe as the ‘mnemonic object’ I had first set out to produce initially: something that holds and contains responses and references to memory and to the past – or that becomes a touchstone for a specific experience.
Sharpay Yuan:
What is important to me is being clear about where my sources come from.
— Your work often engages with layered and complex histories — how do you approach the challenge of making the history visible, while being attentive to their complexity, silences, or absences?
— The challenge of making history visible, for me, is about my choice of source materials—whether written documentation, photograph or historical research. Taking my projects about my family history, the photographs I’ve sourced are not connected to my grandparents’ experiences exactly, but they are sourced and chosen specifically to visualise other instances of similar contexts, so that the visuals feel historically true to what was happening. What is important to me is being clear about where my sources come from, for that element of ‘truthfulness’, and also trying not to manipulate them too much, to just respond to what’s there.
In translating a photograph into a drawing, or a piece of text into an illustration, obviously, there's a shift: I am layering in my own interpretation, my potential bias, and my own aesthetic approaches as well. The image is going to change, and it will be filtered by my hands and my making. When working with history, I find it challenging to work with images that don’t come from specific, connected contexts, so I am always careful about selecting my source materials – as I said, trying to aim for something that feels ‘true’, even if the image, the crop, the emphasis etc. might change in my drawing. Part of what image-making can do is to layer in additional aspects, which happens often in a quite subtle way: it might be colour, or might be through framing images slightly differently to create focus of somewhere else, to allude to a bigger question etc.
— In your work, you bring together multiple methods to navigate diverse voices — almost as if continually testing and seeking an alternative vantage point from which to view yourself. This seems closely tied to negotiations of selfhood and belonging. How do you see your practice—not just as an outcome, but as an ongoing process—shaping or reshaping your own sense of identity?
— I've come to see it more and more like that – with some projects anyway, that they are very much about reshaping and re-evaluating my own sense of identity. The idea of belonging and selfhood does feel very present. The projects we’ve talked about today really rest on my German heritage, and also of being someone who didn't grow up in Germany but grew up in the UK in a German family. I think most people who have that kind of experience of not growing up in the country that their families are from, or the country that holds their mother tongue, feel a bit of gap to their home country, or their heritage. In a way that can be challenging, but it can also be an interesting in terms of allowing for more distance and space to the more difficult histories. At least that's what I’ve experienced. I think it has allowed me to look from a slightly different vantage point than, say, my cousins or friends in Germany might be able to, in relation to the same histories. That’s obviously not true for everybody, it’s a generalisation, but one which feels true for me.
— The challenge of making history visible, for me, is about my choice of source materials—whether written documentation, photograph or historical research. Taking my projects about my family history, the photographs I’ve sourced are not connected to my grandparents’ experiences exactly, but they are sourced and chosen specifically to visualise other instances of similar contexts, so that the visuals feel historically true to what was happening. What is important to me is being clear about where my sources come from, for that element of ‘truthfulness’, and also trying not to manipulate them too much, to just respond to what’s there.
In translating a photograph into a drawing, or a piece of text into an illustration, obviously, there's a shift: I am layering in my own interpretation, my potential bias, and my own aesthetic approaches as well. The image is going to change, and it will be filtered by my hands and my making. When working with history, I find it challenging to work with images that don’t come from specific, connected contexts, so I am always careful about selecting my source materials – as I said, trying to aim for something that feels ‘true’, even if the image, the crop, the emphasis etc. might change in my drawing. Part of what image-making can do is to layer in additional aspects, which happens often in a quite subtle way: it might be colour, or might be through framing images slightly differently to create focus of somewhere else, to allude to a bigger question etc.
— In your work, you bring together multiple methods to navigate diverse voices — almost as if continually testing and seeking an alternative vantage point from which to view yourself. This seems closely tied to negotiations of selfhood and belonging. How do you see your practice—not just as an outcome, but as an ongoing process—shaping or reshaping your own sense of identity?
— I've come to see it more and more like that – with some projects anyway, that they are very much about reshaping and re-evaluating my own sense of identity. The idea of belonging and selfhood does feel very present. The projects we’ve talked about today really rest on my German heritage, and also of being someone who didn't grow up in Germany but grew up in the UK in a German family. I think most people who have that kind of experience of not growing up in the country that their families are from, or the country that holds their mother tongue, feel a bit of gap to their home country, or their heritage. In a way that can be challenging, but it can also be an interesting in terms of allowing for more distance and space to the more difficult histories. At least that's what I’ve experienced. I think it has allowed me to look from a slightly different vantage point than, say, my cousins or friends in Germany might be able to, in relation to the same histories. That’s obviously not true for everybody, it’s a generalisation, but one which feels true for me.