Dr Paul Laidler

Qualifications:

BA, MA, PhD

Position:

Senior Lecturer in BA Illustration

Department:

Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)

Telephone:

+441173284988

Email:

Paul.Laidler@uwe.ac.uk

Social media:

About me

Paul Laidler is an artist, researcher, and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at UWE Bristol whose work investigates illustration as a philosophical practice of mediation. Through expanded graphic practice, printmaking, speculative publishing, material culture, and computational image systems, he examines how images produce knowledge through processes of making, reproduction, translation, and technological collaboration.

At the centre of his research is the proposition that illustration is not primarily a representational discipline but a critical method for thinking through relationships between material culture, technological systems, memory, and visual storytelling. Rather than illustrating ideas that already exist elsewhere, his practice uses illustration to generate ideas through images, materials, and acts of making. It investigates the spaces between original and copy, analogue and digital, human and machine, asking how repetition, derivation, and mediation reshape authorship and create new forms of understanding.

His work explores machines not simply as tools, but as collaborators, narrators, and cultural artefacts. Whether working with carved woodblocks, printed editions, archives, museum collections, generative AI, or speculative publications, Laidler is interested in how technologies participate in storytelling and how systems of production influence what images are capable of remembering, revealing, or concealing.

Research Themes

Laidler's current research is centred on To Live Is to Be Haunted, after Philip K. Dick, an ongoing practice-based project investigating generative AI through science fiction, philosophy of technology, and graphic practice. Drawing on the work of Philip K. Dick alongside thinkers including Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser, and Jacques Derrida, the project explores haunting as a condition of contemporary image culture. Here prompts, synthetic images, archives, remakes, and reproductions unsettle conventional distinctions between originality and derivation, author and machine, memory and simulation. The project produces speculative publications, prompt-generated artefacts, installations, and graphic works that use illustration to critically examine emerging technological futures.

This research extends a sustained investigation into collaborative and mediated image production that began with Laidler's doctoral research into the role of the Master Printer in the digital age. His PhD examined how collaborative print production challenges traditional notions of artistic authorship, arguing that printers, software, materials, and technical processes actively shape creative outcomes. Rather than treating mediation as a secondary stage of production, his research positions it as fundamental to how artistic meaning is constructed.

Building on this work, he co-founded CFPR Editions, UWE Bristol's fine art print publishing studio, establishing it as both a professional publishing workshop and a research laboratory for technologically mediated artistic production. The studio investigates collaborative publishing practices between artists, printers, designers, and digital technologies, creating editions and research projects that examine authorship through material production. This enquiry was further developed through two REACT (Research & Enterprise in Arts & Creative Technologies) grants exploring digital publishing, app technologies, and collaborative models for printed matter.

A recurring thread throughout Laidler's practice is an interest in remakes, reproductions, derivative forms, and editions as creative methodologies rather than secondary acts of production. Projects including Just Press Print, an international touring exhibition exploring dialogues between artists and print technologies, and Looking Through the Eyes of Machines, an international print exchange connecting institutions across the UK, USA, and Spain, investigated post-digital graphic practice and the changing relationship between image-making and technological systems. More recent projects, including Dwelling in the Unresolved, extend this enquiry through speculative publishing, where fictional books, prompt artefacts, and graphic objects become philosophical propositions for thinking through resistance, failure, and unresolved technological futures.

Research Approach

Laidler's practice-based research moves fluidly between studio production, publishing, exhibition, writing, and pedagogy. Rather than treating these as separate activities, he approaches each as a different mode of research through which ideas are tested, materialised, and publicly encountered. Making is understood as a form of critical enquiry: publications become speculative arguments, installations become philosophical propositions, prompt-generated artefacts become research objects, and drawing becomes a method for investigating memory, technology, and cultural narratives.

Central to this approach is the belief that mediation is never neutral. Every image is shaped by the material, technical, and cultural systems through which it passes, whether through a carved woodblock, a museum artefact, a printed edition, a generative model, or a digital screen. His research therefore asks not only what images represent, but how they come into being, what forms of authorship they enable, and how processes of reproduction and translation transform meaning. This methodological position connects analogue craft traditions with computational image practices, treating illustration as a way of thinking through the unresolved conditions of contemporary visual culture.

Research-Led Teaching

Teaching forms an integral part of Laidler's research methodology, where studio practice becomes a space for investigating mediation, materiality, memory, and technological authorship. Across BA Illustration he leads Design Futures and Design Contexts, developing research-led teaching that positions illustration as a method of enquiry rather than simply a vehicle for visual communication.

In Design Futures, students use speculative illustration, design fiction, and emerging technologies to investigate ecological uncertainty, artificial intelligence, and possible cultural futures. The module encourages illustration as a way of constructing critical propositions about the world rather than predicting it, using studio practice to explore uncertainty, systems thinking, and alternative futures.

In Design Contexts, students engage with archives, museum collections, and cultural artefacts through investigative drawing. Objects are approached not simply as things to depict but as carriers of narrative, memory, absence, and contested histories. Students explore both tangible and intangible heritage, asking whose stories objects preserve, whose voices remain absent, and how illustration can reinterpret or reactivate cultural narratives for new audiences. The module positions the illustrator as storyteller, mediator, and custodian of memory, encouraging critical reflection on ethics, positionality, and the cultural responsibilities of visual practice.

Alongside these modules, Laidler's teaching on Material Languages extends his research into the relationship between surface, substrate, and meaning. This framework understands materials not as passive carriers of images but as active participants in narrative construction. Through prototyping, print processes, digital substrates, fabricated artefacts, and acts of making, students investigate how material choices shape perception, authorship, and storytelling across both physical and computational environments. Studio experimentation becomes a form of research in which materials are understood to possess histories, affordances, and narrative agency.

Together these teaching contexts articulate a pedagogic approach in which illustration generates knowledge through making, critical reflection, and material experimentation. Research and teaching operate reciprocally: studio investigations inform curriculum design, while pedagogic experimentation becomes a means of developing new research questions around expanded graphic practice and contemporary image culture.

Area of expertise

Alongside his studio and pedagogic practice, Laidler contributes to international research culture through editorial, examining, publishing, and collaborative roles. He is Associate Editor of Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect), supporting scholarship in drawing and practice-based research, and has served as External Examiner for programmes including Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore.

His work has been exhibited internationally through projects investigating print, publishing, and expanded illustration practice, and he has developed collaborations through research exchanges and residencies including the University of Texas at Austin and the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland. His work is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.

Across research, publishing, teaching, and exhibition, Laidler's practice asks how illustration might operate as a critical and philosophical discipline capable of interrogating the material and technological conditions through which contemporary visual culture is produced.

Publications

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