London-based illustrator and animator Shir Daniel draws postcards from memory of Hyde Park’s water areas, exchanges them with strangers for their own stories, and builds an animation and Risograph journal that asks how memory shapes our relationship with place.
Shir Daniel moved to London and began spending time wandering the water areas of Hyde Park. She became interested in how different people hold different memories of the same place, and what happens when those memories are exchanged. The project that grew from that question is RIVERSIDE: part visual journal, part postcard exchange, part hand-drawn animation and part Risograph print series.
The process began with postcards drawn entirely from memory. Daniel then traded those postcards with strangers for their own personal stories of the same site. The exchange is the conceptual centre of the work: by asking whose memory a place belongs to once it’s shared, RIVERSIDE turns a personal documentary project into something collaborative and genuinely open. The postcards that came back shaped what the project became.
The hand-drawn illustration style connects naturally across all three mediums the project uses. “The hand-drawn, layered quality is something Risograph and animation share with illustration,” Daniel says. “They’re all tactile and imperfect in similar ways, which reflects how memory actually works.” The animation is built from the postcards themselves, each one a separate moment that comes together in motion before dissolving back into individual images. “I wanted the animation and the postcard to be the same object, just experienced differently,” she says. “One you watch, one you hold and can keep with you as a memory.”
RIVERSIDE was developed during Daniel’s MA in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, where she was a full Clore Foundation scholarship recipient.
Shir Daniel is a London-based illustrator, animator and visual designer. Her multidisciplinary practice explores memory, place and storytelling through illustration, animation, print and mixed media.
Website: shirdaniel.com Instagram: @shirdaniel
RIVERSIDE, 2025. Hand-drawn animation, Risograph printed postcards, four-colour print. Developed during MA Visual Communication, Royal College of Art.
