Desdemona McCannon

University of Worcester

An Unsophisticated Art: Tracing the lineage of popular and folk arts within contemporary illustration practice and pedagogy in the UK

Panel: Learning

This paper is a call to recognise illustration’s heritage as an ‘unsophisticated art’ and reclaim the radical potential of traditional art. In his 1966 essay ‘Design as Art’, the designer Bruno Munari claimed that ‘the traditional artist is being transformed into the designer’, making an explicit connection between ‘traditional arts’ and twentieth-century design practice, framing the role of the designer as ‘re-establishing the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing’. Barbara Jones’ book The Unsophisticated Arts, was published in 1951 at the same time as her exhibition of popular and folk art ‘Black Eyes and Lemonade’ opened at the Whitechapel gallery in London. In both she celebrated art forms that were normally overlooked or at least looked down upon. Fairground art, canal barges, decorative ceramics, toys, funeral wreaths, pub signs, taxidermy and tattooing were all categories of art that she called into notice. Noel Carrington’s 1945 definition of ‘popular art’ as ‘art made by and for the people among whom the artist lives and works’ also foregrounds the social function of artworks existing outside an institutionalised intellectual agenda. The contemporary artist Lucy Wright in her ‘Manifesta’ writes that  ‘folk is the stuff we make, do and think for ourselves and the radical potential of these things’.  Looking at illustration practice through the lens of ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ art enables us to interrogate the idea of the past as something that is used to signify nostalgia and instead positions illustrators as creators of culture. In an interview for Varoom! magazine with me in 20094, the artist Mark Hearld said: ‘If you call yourself a folk artist, most likely you are not one,’ a statement that raises questions around authenticity, legitimacy, skill, taste and education.


Desdemona McCannon is an artist, writer and educator with a particular interest in the constellation of images, ideas and skills held by the word ‘folk’. She is Principal Lecturer in Illustration at the University of Worcester where she convenes the ‘Folk Cultures Research’ network. She is part of the steering committee for Illustration Research and is an associate editor of the Journal of Illustration.