This book explores the ways in which artists, designers, architects, activists, and food professionals are applying their skills and imagination to the challenges of creating a more sustainable, fair and pleasurable food future. It accompanied a major exhibition at the V&A and includes contributions by makers, curators and academics.

Read the introduction here.

Images copyright V&A Publishing

A book about the art and design of grassroots social movements. Focussing on a previously under-examined area of object-making, Disobedient Objects tells a people’s history of art and design from below exploring the key role that objects have played in struggles for social change since the late 1970s. 

Read the introduction here.

Images copyright V&A Publishing

British Posters maps how the poster has evolved in Britain since 1945 in the hands of graphic designers and fine artists, advertising agencies and counter-cultural groups. From ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaigns and lavishly produced Benson & Hedges billboards, to punk rock fliers, protest posters, and public art projects, it explores the enduring importance of the poster as a powerful and much-loved medium that has defied regular predictions of demise. 

In writing this book, I was keen to consider not only the design of the posters themselves, but also the spaces they occupy. As part of the living skin of our cities, posters have been a source of conflict over the content and control of public space. Behind closed doors we have welcomed them into our homes, Blu-Tacked them to our bedroom walls and collected them.

Image copyright V&A Publishing

“

The Poster: A Visual History is based on the V&A collections and features many of the posters I acquired for the museum in my role as Prints Curator. In the final chapter Gill Saunders and I address how the poster has mutated and migrated in the 21st century spawning numerous digital descendants. 

“

From the towering coiffures of Georgian Britain to outsize Victorian crinolines, and diaphanous Regency gowns to the languid silhouette of the 1920s flapper, Style and Satire explores how European fashion and its most extreme trends were represented through elegant fashion plates and irreverent satirical prints. Presenting a joint history of the two genres for the first time, it examines the role the print market played in fostering a culture of fashion during the era of industrialisation. 

The idea for this book began in the V&A stores when I noticed that an outfit ridiculed in one of the museum’s satirical prints was copied  – fabric, feathers and all – from a fashion plate published a month earlier in the chic women’s magazine La Belle Assemblée. Further investigation revealed the close connections between these two forms of printed art that pictured everyday life. 

Images copyright V&A Publishing

“