In May 2017, I was selected to participate in Sounds of the City — the Prize for Illustration 2017, an exhibition of one hundred works chosen from over two thousand entries by an expert panel of judges from the art and design world. The exhibition was organised by the London Transport Museum in partnership with the Association of Illustrators (AOI), and ran at the Exterion Media Gallery within the museum in Covent Garden from 19 May to 3 September 2017.
The brief asked illustrators to capture sounds heard in UK cities in a single image — a challenge that felt deeply personal. Sound is invisible, yet it shapes how we inhabit space: the rumble beneath the street, the layered voices of a market, the particular quiet of a garden inside a city. For my contribution, I thought about the sounds of London as a kind of collage — not a single note but a composite of rhythms and registers, each layer telling a different story about who the city is for.
Being included in this show, alongside so many remarkable illustrators, was an affirmation that illustration can do more than decorate — it can listen, and speak back.