Wood Engraving for Science

A team from the University of Sussex went to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff to celebrate Super Science Saturday in October 2019. We had an amazing time; nearly 300 people came to participate. We looked at image-making technologies, from wood engraving and photography to digital media. Participants worked with archival images from scientific…

Stranger Things: Collages by Cosmo Callesini, Dorcas Mimbulu and others (BACA)

These collages were created by students from Brighton Aldridge Academy, during the summer 2019 schools workshops. Participants were challenged to create human-animal hybrid figures, using illustrations from across the Dalziel Archive. Human-animal hybrid figures appeared frequently in Victorian popular culture, especially in children’s fiction, and theatrical entertainments, such as ‘freak’ shows. Workshop students also wrote…

Things Weird and Wonderful, by students from Plashet School

Among the many thousands of illustrations produced by the Brothers Dalziel, images of animals abound. Everything from frogs, cockatoos, and koalas, to starfish and sunflowers, are represented, reflecting the Victorian love of Natural History, and the many popular periodicals, dedicated to the subject, published throughout the nineteenth century. During the Summer 2019 series of workshops,…

Contemporary Printmakers in the Dalziel Archive: Peter S. Smith

As part of the Dalziel Project, contemporary printmakers have been collaborating with researchers, exploring the archive in the British Museum. This has generated new work in dialogue with the Dalziels. Bethan Stevens has written about this in Printmaking Today, focusing on the recent Dalziel-related work of Neil Bousfield, Louise Hayward, Chris Pig and Peter S. Smith: you…

Exploring Materiality and Immateriality in Victorian Wood Engravings, by Carey Gibbons

Carey Gibbons recently completed a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art: The Limits of the Body in Victorian Illustration: Arthur Hughes and Frederick Sandys. Gibbons’s research crosses disciplines, engaging with the illustrations of Hughes and Sandys in relation to their accompanying texts and Victorian science, religion, and gender constructions. She recently curated an exhibition at the…

Contemporary Printmakers in the Dalziel Archive: Chris Pig

Click images above to view gallery As part of the Dalziel Project, contemporary printmakers have been collaborating with researchers, exploring the archive in the British Museum (see more here). This has generated new work in dialogue with the Dalziels. Bethan Stevens recently wrote about this in Printmaking Today, focusing on the recent Dalziel-related work of Neil…

UCA Showcase: Photographic Responses to Dalziel

Here we present a selection of students’ work produced in early 2018 as part of our ongoing collaborative project with UCA Rochester. The images are taken from both developmental work and from final pieces, all of which engage with the Dalziel Archive photographically. Students used photography in mixed-media reproductions and reinventions of Dalziel engravings (John…

Jemima Woolnough, 'Time Takes its Toll'

Time Takes its Toll, by Jemima Woolnough

Earlier this year, young artists at UCA Rochester developed responses to the Dalziel Archive as part of our continuing collaboration. They researched the Dalziel Archive and the Alice to Alice: Dalziel 1865–71 online exhibition and produced new works of art responding to its themes–particularly temporality and sequence. Jemima Woolnough created a sculptural-photographic project, constructing a…

Lucie Stewart, 'Books and the Ballad-Maker', no. 1

Lucie Stewart: Books and the Ballad-Maker

Our ongoing collaboration with UCA Rochester asked artists aged 16–17 to produce a creative response to the Dalziel project, reflecting particularly on themes of sequence and temporality. Lucie Stewart developed a project on ageing and the material book, drawing on the ‘Making Prints and Books’ section of the Alice to Alice: Dalziel 1865–1871 online exhibition.…

Engraved in Time: UCA Student Collaboration, 2018

We were very pleased this year to continue our collaboration with the University of the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent. In 2017, we piloted the project with 16- to 18-year-old students taking the Extended Diploma in Art and Design at UCA, which you can read more about here: ‘Engraved in Time: Reimagining the Dalziel Brothers’.…

Lauren Tearle, 'Garden of Live Flowers'

Lauren Tearle’s Garden of Live Flowers

For the second year running, we have collaborated on a project for 16- to 18-year-old art students at UCA Rochester, where students were prompted to develop a sequential set of images inspired by images from the Dalziel archive. Lauren Tearle created a series of collages influenced by the Dalziel engravings of John Tenniel’s ‘The Garden…

The Past inside the Present: The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

Michael John Goodman completed his PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University in December 2016. His thesis, ‘Illustrating Shakespeare: Practice, Theory and the Digital Humanities’ explored how digital technology can be used to make sense of historical (specifically Victorian) illustrations of Shakespeare’s plays. The project saw the launch of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, an online open access resource…

Wood-engraved Pictorial Initials in Victorian Periodicals: Some Assembly Required, by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is Professor of English and the Co-director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is co-investigator on the Children’s Literature Archive (CLA) project and the founder and principal investigator of the Yellow Nineties Online, a digital research environment for the study of aesthetic periodicals of 1890s Great Britain.…