What they collected were works as varied as the people who made them. In this panel, researchers and academics Meg O’Shea, Dr Pat Grant and Gabriel Clark will discuss the collection of works purchased for the Library and share how the themes found in these works relate to their public facing research project Folio: Stories of Australian Comics.

About Folio

Folio is an Australia Research Council-funded Linkage Project titled Contemporary Australian Comics 1980-2020: A New History with additional financial support from the National Library of Australia and Creative Australia. The University of Melbourne, RMIT, and University of Technology Sydney managed the project. Folio opens up a new way of seeing Australia; a secret history drawn by our unique creators.

Attend in person 

Entry to this event is free but bookings are essential.

Watch online

The presentation will also be available online. Please make a booking and we will send you a direct link to the livestream event via email. Or you can join anytime through the Library's YouTube channel.

About the speakers

Gabriel Clark - Co-producer

Gabriel Clark is creative producer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University Technology Sydney. He is a visual communication design practitioner and academic whose expertise is in comics, graphic storytelling, motion design, digital photo media, and multi-platform storytelling. His research is predominately focused on graphic storytelling and performance - an area where he has been awarded several grants and commissions for his work, including the ARC linkage project Folio: Stories of Australian Comics, and is co-editor of the scholarly book on Australian Comics from Palgrave Macmillian. He conceived and co-produces the cult graphic storytelling event Read to Me, the award-winning multimodal storytelling project Radio with Pictures, and is a co-founder of Graphic festival at the Sydney Opera House.

Meg O'Shea - Research Assistant

Meg O’Shea is an Eisner award-winning and Ignatz award-nominated Korean adoptee comic maker, educator and research assistant based in Sydney, on Dharug Country. She makes largely autobiographical and non-fiction work that has appeared in The Nib, The Lily, Liminal Magazine, The Comics Journal and anthologies. She has exhibited comic, animation and film work internationally, taught comic making to university students, developed and delivered comics programs to high school-aged students and art programs to primary-aged students. Since 2022, she has been a research assistant for Folio. Meg is currently working on a long form work based on her experiences as the Asian child of white parents in Australia, a recent period of living in Korea, and a failed search for her Korean mother.

Dr Patrick Grant - Senior Lecturer UTS

Patrick Grant’s research expertise sits at the intersection of visual storytelling and graphic anthropology. A pioneer in the practice-based study of graphic storytelling, he has contributed to the development of undergraduate curricula in visual narrative at UTS and at Melbourne University. Pat is the author of two graphic novels that have been published internationally and have garnered several awards. His first book Blue was listed as one of the great graphic novels of 2012 by the US culture journal Salon. His next graphic novel, The Grot, was released in 2020. Pat is the founder and co-director of Comic Art Workshop, an independent organisation that supports graphic novelists and comic-book artists who are working on ambitious projects through a rigorous process of literary workshopping.