Day: August 27, 2012

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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.

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Oriel Ynys Môn

Neil Cocks from The University of Reading visited Oriel Ynys Môn last week in preparation for the opening of the Tunnicliffe/Ladybird exhibition he is co-curating at MERL. Oriel Ynys Môn has a world class collection of Tunnicliffe material, and a track record of utilising it within innovative exhibitions. Museum Officer Ian Jones showed Neil around the current exhibitions, as well as introducing him to a wealth of archive material. Hopefully, a number of significant loan items will appear in the MERL exhibition – we will keep you posted!

Neil says of his trip:

“The Tunnicliffe work at Oriel Ynys Môn is breathtaking, especially the notebooks. These are filled with such an array of styles. Tunnicliffe was clearly interested in constantly pushing his art. Ian Jones is an expert in the field, and his knowledge of Tunnicliffe’s work – from his use of field glasses, to his choices of location – really helped me develop my own understanding.

I should also mention the current Kyffin Williams exhibition at Oriel Ynys Môn. Recently, some Williams work was exhibited alongside paintings by Tunnicliffe, helping to bring to light connections between these two island artists. Williams’s canvases are all illuminated dusks, great spread-squares of grey, yellow, black and white. The paint is frequently applied in thick palate knife strokes, but has an odd, insubstantial quality for all that. Haunting and beautiful images…”