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Author: Alice Mercier, PhD Candidate, Visual Culture, University of Westminster
Original article: https://theconversation.com/helen-oxenbury-illustrating-the-land-of-childhood-exhibition-showcases-the-adventure-and-anxiety-of-our-formative-years-251858
There’s an illustration by Helen Oxenbury in the new exhibition of her work, Illustrating the Land of Childhood, at Burgh House, Hampstead, that I hadn’t seen before.
Titled The House, the pen and watercolour image, mostly in black-and-white, shows the exterior of a street. Two windows of a single house are lit up in colour. The upstairs window looks in on a bedroom where a child is sleeping, and the window below shows the child’s mother preparing breakfast in the kitchen downstairs.
Who would’ve known that these characters had recently planted a plum tree in the bedroom that had burst through the floors and ceilings, almost destroying the home? Such is the story of Meal One (1971), by Oxenbury and Ivor Cutler, from which The House is taken.
Land of Childhood is Oxenbury’s first solo exhibition, and The House encapsulates the essence of the show. The world depicted through Oxenbury’s illustrations is one of family gatherings, mealtimes and activities, but also of oceans, forests, night skies and caves. Together they illuminate the adventure and anxiety of childhood.
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The exhibition spans almost six decades of Oxenbury’s career as a children’s book illustrator. In doing so, it demonstrates the different media that Oxenbury has worked with – including pastels, pen, gouache, watercolour and clay – to tell these stories.
Courtesy of Helen Oxenbury
The earliest illustrations on display are from the 1960s, so it is also possible to follow a kind of journey through the materials used for creating and producing children’s books from the second half of the 20th century onward.
Like Oxenbury’s illustrations, the exhibition gallery in Burgh House offers something new to find in each alcove, recess, display case and picture wall of the room, with the artwork spotlit in the otherwise shaded room.
The gallery itself is small, meaning that visitors are close to the pictures and models on display. This compels a proximity to the images that is less typical of gallery exhibitions, and more familiar to reading books.
The descriptions on the wall are concise, noting the stories that the illustrations were made for, but without reproducing sections of the narrative. There is something exciting about seeing the illustrations loosened slightly from the stories that usually contain them.
Courtesy of Helen Oxenbury
The character and animation of things runs through the images and models in the exhibition, as does the drama and detail of the smallest interactions or tasks illustrated. The movement and rush of childhood seems especially vivid in the illustrations from the 1980s onward, including those from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989, Michael Rosen), So Much (1994, Trish Cooke) and Through the Looking-Glass (2008, Lewis Carroll).
Seeing Oxenbury’s artwork on display, I think part of the effectiveness of these illustrations lies in their apparent openness, and the suggestion of vast spaces that extend just beyond the frame, or the unfolding of a scene yet to be concluded. This perhaps also underpins Oxenbury’s approach to illustrating childhood itself, when so much of our everyday is surprising.
And this is echoed in the sense of things still in motion that I noticed throughout the exhibition. Oxenbury’s interpretations of scene, and intimations of movement, are rendered in the almost unreal, vibrant pastel colours of a world that is still forming, and where anything is possible.
Helen Oxenbury: Illustrating the Land of Childhood is on until December 14, in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Gallery at Burgh House in Hampstead, London.