RAMM: Wow! Amazing Science in Children's Books, Various

This exhibition runs until the 26th April 2026.

I love science, so any exhibition that combines science and art is always going to be a big hit for me.  I really don't care that the art is aimed at children.  Why would I?  It does not make it any less worthwhile.  It actually means it will be attractive and fun and these are qualities I value.  The artists who produced the pieces in this exhibition were all incredibly talented.  It's great that there art gets to be seen and appreciated by more people.

I imagine this exhibition was much visited during the Easter holidays but now the schools are back, it was very quiet in this gallery.  A few younger children were brought in, but I think they were perhaps too young to be absorbed by the pieces of art.  I think they needed more interactive elements.  Those that there were, were the most popular part with the children who visited while I was there.

I always think it's a shame when one exhibition is incredibly overcrowded and another is not well visited.  There was a lot to enjoy in this exhibition, even as a scientifically literate adult.  I know that such art was incredibly inspirational to me as a child.  I had a children's science encyclopedia and an Usborne book on how the body worked.

The room was divided up with several different partition walls.  A few different scientific themes had been chosen and art was grouped together and there was a narrative in each theme with some additional detail included alongside the art.  Themes included the solar system, the world around us, what we are made of, what we eat, machines and mechanics and futures imagined.  Each theme had a scientist in the spotlight.

The art was lovely and there was a variety of styles, some more diagrammatic.  As a big kid who loves science, it was great.

The art was at a mix of heights.  There was an attempt to have it accessible for adults and children.  There were some larger pieces, one started at the floor and went up while another was mostly on the floor before going up the wall a little.  There was an activity to place wooden blocks with bones on in to a skeleton.   There was a selection of children's science books to look at.

It was lovely to see illustration treated as art in this way.  It's easy to take it for granted.  We often don't even pay any attention to who the illustrator is in a children's book.  

I think my two favourite themes were the solar system and futures imagined.

Futures Imagined had a really wide remit.  My favourite pieces included four by Oliver Jeffers which were just beautiful.  As a set they had a beautiful, but limited pallet.  They looked at concepts around us being just passengers on planet earth, that maybe we look at old ways of doing things and how do we work together? Neal Layton's book 'Welcome to AI - What is Artificial Intelligence and how will it change our lives?' looks like a great book for children as this new thing is unleashed on our world and begins changing it.  

I love space and the concepts involved always seem to be to lend themselves to interesting pictures.  Annabelle Buxton's, the Universe is Born, was a stunning piece that attempted to make a picture of an incredibly complex happening.  I think it brings up an interesting question...  how important is it to simplify a concept so it can be a introduction, even if the simplification also introduces incorrect ideas?  The Big Bang, wasn't a single point explosion, everything exploded everywhere at once.  I don't think  any picture can help a child understand a concept like this, which most adults would struggle with.  I guess though, people don't expect children's diagrams of space to be accurate.  The scales are too vast.  

Scientific illustration is an artform all it's own, to make it accessible for children has to be even harder.

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