A bartender with a sketchbook, and a room full of stories
Most bar talk evaporates by last orders. Not this time. Edie Medley—an illustrator who also manages shifts at a pub—has been turning overheard chatter into a drawing series she calls "I'm Not Listening." It’s a sharp, funny, sometimes tender record of the kind of conversations people have when the lights are low, the chairs are pulled close, and the bubbles make everyone braver than they realize.
The premise is simple and disarming: while working behind the bar or clearing glasses, Medley hears snatches of talk. She isn’t hunting for them; they land in her lap. That’s the nature of the job. As she puts it, when you’re pulling pints and moving through a packed room, you can’t help but tune in. The bar becomes both her workplace and her studio—part sound booth, part stage set—where small dramas unfold every hour.
The range of scenes is the point. Friends who haven’t seen each other in years trying to fit a decade into a pint. Regulars who circle the same table at the same time each week, carrying the same arguments forward like a serial. First dates testing for chemistry. Colleagues decompressing after a shift elsewhere. The pub is a social engine; Medley shows how it processes everyday life. The bustle is constant, but her drawings slow it down so you can see the beats within the noise.
She treats the room like a living archive. Voices overlap. Glasses clink. A half-heard confession collides with a joke from the next booth. Conversation fragments—unexpected metaphors, awkward pauses, nervous laughter—become her raw material. Instead of recording people, she translates the rhythm of their talk into composition: the rise and fall of a line in a story becomes a literal line in a drawing; a joke lands as a bold stroke; a tense pause shows up as negative space.
What gives the project its edge is the illusion of privacy that pubs create. Dim lighting softens the room. Tables sit inches apart. A couple leans in, assuming their bubble is intact. But acoustics in bars are messy. Staff pass through those bubbles all night. Medley’s work underscores that contradiction: people feel hidden in plain sight. That’s not a gotcha—more a social truth. Pubs are public rooms with private moods, and that tension is the lifeblood of her series.
Turning overheard life into pictures—without breaking the spell
There’s a long tradition of artists working where real life is messy and unscripted. Street photographers do it with a shutter; reportage illustrators do it with a pencil. Medley’s twist is her vantage point. Bartenders and bar managers see everything. They track the room while keeping a hand on the till and an eye on a wavering pint. That split attention—service plus observation—gives her drawings a steady, no-drama tone. She’s not chasing spectacle. She’s cataloging patterns in how people talk when the stakes are low and the emotions are real.
The title, "I’m Not Listening," does some heavy lifting too. It’s a wink at the awkwardness of overhearing while you work. It also captures the blurry line between intentional eavesdropping and unavoidable sound. A pub worker can’t turn the room down; you’re in it. Medley owns that tension and uses it as a frame. The result is less gossip, more anthropology. Her pictures feel like field notes for anyone who has ever looked around a bar and wondered, what’s happening two tables over?
Her process sits somewhere between drawing and editing. She deals in snippets, not transcripts. The bits that stick—a sharp aside, a thought said too loudly, a quiet admission—get distilled. On the page, language becomes shape. If a conversation meanders, she lets the composition meander. If a confession hits hard, she sharpens the contrast. You can’t see the speakers, but you understand the scene. It’s the atmosphere that carries the story.
The pub setting matters. Bars are memory machines. People use them to mark time: first dates, reconciliations, post-match autopsies, birthdays that accidentally spill into Mondays. Regulars bring a rhythm, and that rhythm forms a cast. You might not know their names, but you recognize their roles—the early solo reader, the table of rehearsed banter, the pair who arrive laughing and leave quiet. Medley’s series picks up those signals and gives them form.
There’s also an ethics question humming underneath: is it fair to turn overheard talk into art? The project answers by staying at a respectful distance. It relies on fragments, not identities. Nothing here points a finger at a person; it points at a shared human moment. The point isn’t who said it. It’s that people say these things—vulnerable, funny, nervous, brave—when they think the outside world has dimmed enough to fade away. In a sense, the drawings protect what they reveal. They keep the soul of the moment, not the specifics.
For anyone who has worked in hospitality, the series will feel true. You learn to read a room. You know how a loud hello can mask a long week. You can predict when a joke will repeat at 10:15 every Thursday. The job isn’t just service; it’s pattern recognition. Medley turns that skill into a visual diary. It doubles as a reminder that the people who serve your drinks see you at your most unguarded—one more reason the best regulars treat the staff like collaborators in keeping the room humane.
There’s a craft layer worth noting too. Conversation has pacing, and Medley leans into that. She plays with spacing on the page, weights her lines to match the emotional charge, and treats silence like a character. In some pieces, you can imagine the music bleeding in from the edges, the way bass lines compress thought into quick bursts. In others, the white space does the talking; she lets a pause sit so long you feel the awkwardness.
It’s easy to imagine the scenes that feed the work—without needing any secret details. A reunion that runs on nostalgia until a new truth slips out. A first date that jitters through small talk before it finds a groove. A table of old friends switching from jokes to logistics, figuring out who’s okay and who isn’t. In those moments, the bar stops being just a bar. It becomes a middle ground where people tell the truth they can’t tell in daylight.
"I’m Not Listening" lands at a time when public spaces matter in a different way. After years of disrupted routines, people are relearning how to be around each other. Pubs and bars, for all their noise and spill, offer a soft landing. Medley’s drawings catch that return to form—the way social muscles warm up again, the way stories expand as the night goes on. Her work doesn’t lecture. It simply records what the room already knows: when people feel safe enough to speak, they show you who they are.
There’s also the balancing act in her own life: part-time manager, full-time observer, freelance illustrator in between. That double shift gives the series purpose. It’s not an escape from work; it grows out of it. The service job becomes the lens, the drawings the proof that creative practice doesn’t have to wait for perfect conditions. Sometimes the best studio is a crowded floor, a damp bar mat, and a pen that survives the wash.
What comes next feels open. The work already reads like a book of modern pub life, a record of the unremarkable moments that make a place matter. It could live on walls, sure, but it also makes sense as a pocket zine or a series you stumble across one at a time, the way you stumble into a good conversation. Either way, the appeal is clear. People don’t go to bars only for drinks. They go to be around a hum that sounds like life, and to add a line or two to it without thinking. Medley listened—whether she meant to or not—and she found a way to draw the hum.
