Banners and panels ready

As discussed above, the exhibition on Ladybird and Tunnicliffe at MERL will feature work by a number of academics from the University of Reading discussing what they look for in a single image from What to Look For in Autumn. The approaches range from Art History to Biology, Typography to Critical Theory. Each response is displayed on a banner or panel, that works through some key ideas. Many of these have now been printed.

1) Looking at the Artist introduces some biographical information about the artist Tunnicliffe, placing the image from What to Look for in Autumn in the context of his life and work.

2) Looking at Art and Style relates the image to the work of artists that influenced Tunnicliffe.

3) Looking at How to Look asks a range of questions about the framing of the image.

4) Looking at Artefacts explores the various objects depicted in the images, and from this discusses the representation the natural and the human

5) Looking at Childhood places the image in the context of changing C20th attitudes to childhood.

6) Looking at Letterforms relates the word forms in What to Look For in Autumn to typographical innovations within the wider series of Ladybird publications.

7) Looking at Book Design describes the printing and design process, and the influence technical considerations had on the image and the book from which it is taken .

8) Looking at Names uses the mushrooms depicted in the image as a starting point for a discussion of the relationship between names and things.

9) Looking at Absence is interested in things outside of the image’s frame and how they contribute to the image within.

10) Looking at the Hunt relates the image to some of Tunnicliffe’s other depictions of hunting

11) Looking at Science engages with the work of Grant-Watson, the biologist and writer who supplied the text that accompanies the image.

12) Looking at Learning relates the image to contemporary ideas of education and literacy.

13) Looking at Rural History approaches the image through changing ideas of the rural and nature.

14) Looking at Images is a photographic response to the What to Look For books by Wig Sayell, a contemporary artist.

Wig Sayell – a contemporary artist

Part of the forthcoming MERL Ladybird exhibition will be a series of banners featuring responses to Ladybird images by University of Reading academics. We asked these academics ‘what do you look for when you look at one of the “What to Look For  in Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter” Ladybird books? We asked a visual artist the same question.

Wig Sayell has a longstanding interest in offering complex engagements with landscape and rural history. Her response to our commission was to produce four images, each reflecting one of the four ‘What To Look For…’ books.

Here is the image for ‘Autumn’.  In a future blog entry, we will be interviewing Wig, and asking her to talk through the ideas that inform this image, and the techniques she used to produce it.