Catalogue | Is this Planet Earth?

Is This Planet Earth? is a contemporary art exhibition with a sci-fi feel and ecological undercurrents. Plant-like sculptures by Halina Dominska appear to breathe. There is a video by Helen Sear of a teeming, psychedelic puddle; another by Seán Vicary features a spaceship seashell. 

Paintings by Katherine Reekie portray hybrid lifeforms; oil-on-canvas landscapes by Dan Hays pixelate and dazzle. There are soft sculptures of rockpools by Alfie Strong and a ceramic moss and fungus garden by Salvatore Arancio. 

The performance artist Patrick Coyle conducts futuristic tours, and Jason Singh’s beatbox soundtrack emits reptilian croaks and birdsong. I curated Is This Planet Earth? as the launch exhibition for Ty Pawb in Wrexham, and it has now toured to Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, opening on 27 April. My proposal to visitors is that life on earth is extinct and that the art on view is an offering to aliens who visit us in the future. Instead of seeing nature in reality, this is what they encounter.

It is an unusual pitch for an exhibition and we wanted a catalogue to match. James Harper, the curator at Ty Pawb, commissioned Fraser Muggeridge Studio to design it. I have worked with the studio before and was confident that it would live up to its claim of “allowing images and texts to sustain their own intent and impact”. 

The brief for the catalogue was “be as imaginative as you like, but also reflect the professionalism of the art”. The budget was £2,000 for 3,000 copies, which meant it had to be a modest 32 pages, stapled together. 

Throughout the design process, Harper and I were included in the decision-making. How would the texts, in both Welsh and English, work? Having it, as Muggeridge says, “with no front and back and conceived as two catalogues”, means you flip it over to find the language you require. 

How, then, would you have the images? Solution: as a middle section, with the images on their side. What about the cover? “There is no type on the cover, so that the covers can be viewed all ways up.”

So readers have to turn the catalogue over and explore it in their hands – thereby neatly fitting one of the aims of Is This Planet Earth? which is to defamiliarise the viewer.

In a further switcharound, paper is used in a different way from normal practice. Coated paper is used for the text and uncoated for the images and cover.

In terms of text, the upper-case letters are based on a futuristic typeface by 1950s design icon Edward Wright, and the lower-case letters are based on an IBM golf ball typewriter font. A maverick notation system, specially invented by the studio, identifies the images. The effect is modern yet homespun, and a nod to independent magazines for sci-fi enthusiasts. 

“Ultimately, I was trying to create an object that is knowingly wrong, hence my choices,” Muggeridge says. “I wanted to create an interesting thing that can be part of the show, as opposed to a traditional catalogue.”