I draw, animate and research. For the last decade my work has moved between Manchester and Mexico, approaching Mexican and Mesoamerican visual culture as a living counterpart — something to think alongside, draw with, and answer to.
My PhD (Media, Manchester Metropolitan University, AHRC-funded) developed ritual return: a practice-based approach to the Amoxtli Tezcatlipoca — the manuscript catalogued as the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer — that asks what return means when an object cannot yet come home. The project connected World Museum Liverpool, INAH Puebla and Indigenous communities in Mexico through facsimiles, workshops, exhibitions and a 3D model that lets the manuscript unfold anywhere in the world.
Before that: an MA in Visual Anthropology (Distinction, University of Manchester), where comics became my method — graphic ethnographies of Mexican family myths and intergenerational memory that have since been published, exhibited and taught on three continents.
I work as an editor at Otherwise Magazine, lecture on graphic anthropology, and am developing a research programme on digital and intellectual-property restitution for Mesoamerican manuscripts with partners at Warwick, Exeter and INAH.
In numbers, for those who count them: £100k+ in competitive funding secured (AHRC, Leverhulme, ACE); £300k under review; invited talks at Harvard Divinity School, Warwick, Bern and the Museo Regional de Puebla; exhibitions from World Museum Liverpool to the Embassy of Mexico in the UK.
Bilingual English/Español. Working French.
José Sherwood González 