Beatrix Potter and Mycology with V&A Curator of Illustration Annemarie Bilclough

Annemarie Bilclough is coming to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) on Thursday 12 November for a talk on Beatrix Potter's fascination with mushrooms. Bilclough is the Frederick Warne Curator of Illustration at the V&A, and she's spent over 25 years at the museum working on displays of prints and drawings and several large exhibitions, including Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature (2022), Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (2021) and Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic (2017).

The talk looks at the double life Potter led: by day, an amateur scientist who studied and experimented with fungal germination; by night, a storyteller interested in mushrooms in folklore. It's that overlap between the scientific and the imaginative that Bilclough draws on, so if you've only ever known Potter for the Peter Rabbit side of things, this is a good way into the other half of her work.

The session is part of RAMM's Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi events programme, so it sits alongside other things the museum is doing around the same theme. It runs from 18:30 to 20:00 at RAMM on Queen Street, EX4 3RX, with tickets at £10.50 standard and £5.50 for students.