ILLUSTRATING CULTURE

Joining link for the event HERE

Speakers

ELAINE MITCHELL Illustrating the consumption of nature: James Bisset’s Magnificent Directory Published in 1800, Bisset’s Magnificent Directory combined text with image to illustrate, organise and celebrate Birmingham as a manufacturing town. But behind the galaxy of illustrations that foreground the town’s wares lies the under-explored theme of the consumption of nature. This talk explores the plates to bring the natural world to the fore. In so doing it illuminates fashionable cultural trends, situates Birmingham within a global trading context and illustrates Britain’s role in colonialism and economic botany.  ELAINE is a research student in the Centre for Midlands History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. She is in the final year of her thesis which explores Birmingham in the eighteenth century through the lens of gardening and horticulture. Publications include ‘Marigolds not Manufacturing. Plants, Print and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Birmingham’ in Caroline Archer-Parée and Malcolm Dick (eds.), Pen, Print and Communication in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020). 

EMMA WEST Designs for Discussion: Posters and Periodicals at the Bureau of Current Affairs (1946-51). Can discussion help create a fairer and more peaceful world? In the years immediately following WWII, a group of artists, writers and educators thought so. From 1946-51 the Bureau of Current Affairs (BCA) published a fortnightly poster, Map Review, and a periodical, Current Affairs, designed to promote citizenship and stimulate discussion in the postwar world. Beautifully designed and illustrated, the posters and pamphlets covered economic, political, social and cultural issues, from Indian Partition to an ageing population. Over 7 million BCA publications were used by discussion groups in libraries, youth clubs, community centres, workplaces and schools; despite these impressive sales, however, the BCA is largely forgotten today. In this talk, I’ll share preliminary research into the BCA collection recently discovered at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. The posters and periodicals are a real time capsule for the immediate postwar years, capturing both mid-century aesthetics and cultural politics. They offer an insight not only into the changing postwar world but also shifting conceptions of adult education, and the printed image’s place within it.  EMMA is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, Drama & Creative Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her recent British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship examined the public reception of modern art, design, literature, and performance in interwar and postwar Britain. She has published widely on print and periodical culture; she is the editor (with Brittany Moster Bergonzi) of ‘Word and Image on the Printed Page’, a special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2022). She is currently writing her first book, Art for the People: Everyday Encounters with the Arts in Modern Britain.