About me

Ceilidh Birkhahn (BFA SAIC ’23) creates multimedia art and design work at the intersection of fantasy and technology, including music, writing, performance, HTML/CSS, and illustration. They co-run Procrastinating Writers United, and published anthologies Both False & True (2019) and Long-Winded (2024) through Lip Think Press. Their work has been exhibited and/or published various places, most recently the Electronic Literature Organization (un)linked 2024 Conference.

Aside from the arts, Ceilidh likes sweet star fruit, indie pop, dragons, and has maintained a “piano hobby” for over fourteen years. They currently work alongside several arts organizations and educators, focusing on making the arts more accessible to a wider local and global audience.

Contact

Portfolio

• Illustration
  Character art & design
• Comics
  single-page comics, multipage comics
• Fine art
  Drawing & mixed media, painting, printmaking
• Graphic design
  Promotions / posters, branding
• Coding / web design
  Websites, HTML & CSS
• Music & audio
  Composition
• Writing
  Poetry, prose, essays
• Photo & video
  Photography, short films
• Fabric / textile
  Sewing, quilting
• Projects & collaborations
  Large projects, collaborations & contributions
• Other / misc.
  Projects that don’t fit cleanly into the categories above.

More

• Creative education
  Classes, mentorships, and other educational opportunities
• Galleries & exhibitions
  Outside work features
• Publications
  Submissions, interviews, and other press

Illustration

Design references and illustrations of original characters and settings, primarily digital art using Procreate, iPad / Apple Pencil, and custom brushes.

Above: illustrations of original characters and settings.
Below: selected works from #illusetry, an illustrated Instagram poetry project.

> See also: Both False & True Anthology, Poetry, The Eluthisuran Compendium

Comics

I began to dive into comics during the spring and summer of 2022, with a comics course in the spring and a three week intensive over the summer.

Above: short one-page work, both self-portrait comics and submissions to various publications.
Below: multipage comics, mainly set in the imaginary world of Eluthisura.

• And All I Got Was This Dragon
  Set in the world of Eluthisura, the 3-page comic details an incident in the shared past of Leonard and Sock. Completed during the 2022 summer intensive.
• A Survey of the Mistery
  Another Eluthisuran comic featuring Leonard and Sock, wherein Leonard tries to give an interview for 3 pages. Completed during the spring semester of 2023.
• The Caged Machine
  10-page comic set in Eluthisura, detailing Anna’s escape from Lady Eleanor. Completed during the 2022 summer intensive.
• The Day I Left
  2-page Eluthisuran comic about Teal’s departure from her home in the Forest of Silence. Completed during the 2022 summer intensive.

> See also: Publications, The Eluthisuran Compendium, do you know

Fine art

Above: work in traditional mediums, including ink, charcoal, pen & ink, and acrylic.

Below: various forms of printmaking, including screen printing (various processes) and block printing.

> See also: Illustration, comics

Graphic design

Colorful palettes, clean styles, serifs, pattern, and biomorphic shapes. I enjoy experimenting with filters and gravitate towards flat, discrete colors over gradients.

Above: posters, social media graphics, & other promotional design.

Above: Procrastinating Writers United branding & identity, promotional materials, & website design.

> See also: Both False & True Anthology, coding / web design, Procrastinating Writers United, this site

Coding / web design – Websites, HTML & CSS

• chatlog roulette
  Shuffling random messages sent by myself over the past few years, chatlog roulette invites the viewer to construct their own narrative from the ambiguous textual format.
• i cannot go
  Generative poetry using the Perchance.org engine.
• Procrastinating Writers United
  Writing group website with custom-coded theme based on Twenty Sixteen from WordPress.
• The Eluthisuran Compendium
  Original fantasy-steampunk worldbuilding wiki site. Contains characters, maps, definitions, diegetic music, and, of course, art. Built using WordPress, with some HTML / CSS tweaks to the preexisting WikiWP theme.
• Wall
  Coded in Dreamweaver, “Wall” uses original photography and the Bootstrap framework.

Above: selected webpage screenshots.

As an occasional hobby, I code informal Bootstrap decorations for a multipurpose character storage site known as Toyhou.se. Some of them can be found here.

> See also: Poetry, ghost story in 3 parts (key of a minor)

Music & audio – Composition

I compose using a combination of Musescore 3, Musescore 4, Reaper, and Audacity. As an intermediate pianist, I often brainstorm initial melodies on a keyboard.

The pieces below were in the 2023 SAIC Undergraduate BFA show.

> See also: The Eluthisuran Compendium, “tidy” multimedia project

Writing

• Poetry
  • #illusetry
    Illustrated poetry project, currently hosted on Instagram. The title is a mashup between the words illustration and poetry, and suggests a connection to illusion; attempting to encapsulate & enhance the experience of posting poetry via the image-centric social media platform.
  • Cassandra, Lay Your Burdens Down
    Rhyming poem about the weight of truth.
  • i cannot go
    Shuffle poetry using the Perchance engine. Published in the ELO (Un)linked 2024 Exhibition.
• Fiction
  • The Caged Machine
    Short work that served as the precursor to The Eluthisuran Compendium, featuring Anna’s origin story. Published in Both False & True.
  • THE KENNELS OF HELL ARE QUIET TONIGHT
    Existential horror flash fiction; there is a dog in your neighbor’s yard.
  • price
    Experimental flash fiction; bargaining with godlike entities comes with an unpredictable price.
  • she is drawn to the sky
    Prose-poem amalgamation; she’s gone through life feeling like a stranger.
• Nonfiction
  • I Didn’t Manage To Look At Any Of The Art, But—
    A personal essay on galleries as an existential window to childhood.
  • The Art of the Imaginary Jackpot: An Exploration of the NFT as Product and Concept
    A part personal, part analytical essay questioning the purpose and validity of the non-fungible token.
• Other writing
  • do you know how to tell the beginning from the end?
    Visual webtoon-formatted experimental essay and sound work. Reformatted and published in COVID Cautious Queers.
  • UnInstructions
    Slice-of-life tweets, repeatedly machine-translated into incoherent hilarity.

> See also: Both False & True, The Eluthisuran Compendium, Publications

Photo & Video

Below: Edited digital photography.

> See also: “tidy” multimedia project

Fabric / textile

Above: “Mme. Butterfly” quilt, created in Fall 2022 for the Tell Me a Story assignment.

Projects & collaborations – Larger projects, collaborations & contributions

Both False & True anthology, an offshoot of the writing group Procrastinating Writers United, was compiled and edited by myself and the co-founder of the writing group. One year of contacting young authors, illustrating, editing, and formatting later, the anthology was self-published in 2019 as a paperback through Barnes & Noble Press.

Both False & True is available for sale here.

Long-Winded anthology, an offshoot of the writing group Procrastinating Writers United, was compiled and edited by myself and the co-founder of the writing group. One year of distributing flyers, following up with authors, illustrating, editing, and formatting later, the anthology will be self-published in July 2024 as a paperback through Barnes & Noble Press. It is also available in PDF and ePub formats.

Long-Winded is available through Barnes & Noble Press & directly from Procrastinating Writers United.

> See also: Prose, publications, Procrastinating Writers United

Other / misc. – Projects that do not fit cleanly into the categories above.

“tidy”
Multimedia project (music, video performance, webpage)
March 2022

A reworked concept from late 2020, “tidy” is a love letter to the Dada art movement. The full webpage (which can be found here) includes the subtitle “close to the beginning, where i was to find the qualifying sandwich, in” – an homage to Hannah Hoch’s famous “Cut with the kitchen knife,” as well as an oblique reference to nonsensical Dada naming conventions.

The work itself is an exploration of “tidying up,” whatever that may mean; it also investigates how the speed of the music influences the viewer’s perception of the speed of the video, which is static throughout.

Visit the webpage by clicking here.

“do you know how to tell the beginning from the end“
Multimedia project (webtoon illustration, audio, essay)
April 2023

A snapshot of pandemic struggle, “do you know” is about questions I still wrestle with. At its core, it asks: where do we go from here? And, more specifically, where do I go from here? The audio narration was recorded from behind the vestiges of a head cold and a sort of simmering heartache, and is intended to be played along as the reader travels down the page. “do you know” is a self-portrait of frustration, abstracted out of the factual and broaching the philosophical, and it crashed the drawing program at least 6 separate times.

The current version of the work may be visited here.

“ghost story in 3 parts (key of a minor)”
Multimedia project (photography, HTML/CSS, poetry)
January 2024

As the work says: i’m a stupid ghost stuck in this stupid, stupid machine. “ghost story in 3 parts (key of a minor)” pulls from a fascination with the more darkly imagined side of science fiction transhumanism. Is the consciousness trapped behind the page a former-person, or an artificial mind approaching the vestiges of humanity from the opposite end of the scale? At what point does the page fronting the self become the only part of the self remaining?

The internet may still be referred to as a relatively new phenomenon, and yet many pockets of it are already abandoned; by the death of its developers and writers, whether that be a literal death or the more metaphorical ones of passion, funding, time. Stumbling upon the ghost town of a once-thriving blog from 2008, I might find myself peering around corners in anticipation of some kind of haunting.

The HTML/CSS and other coding was written by myself, with the exception of the fullscreen function and the Perchance engine. The current version of the work may be visited here.

More

Creative education – Classes, mentorships, and misc. educational opportunities

From kindergarten through my junior year of high school, I was educated in a mishmash homeschool style that included workbooks, outside classes, “lifelong learning,” and dual-enrollment. My senior year was completed at a charter school, and I enrolled at my local community college. After completing two years of community college and most of my general education courses, I transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After attending both hybrid and in-person courses, I graduated with my BFA in Studio.

Galleries & exhibitions – Outside work features

Publications – Submissions, interviews, and other