Ceal Warnants Brings the Riot: New Protest Series Prints Land at Atom Gallery
Edwardian picture-book children carrying placards, banners and quiet fury — quintessentially Ceal, freshly arrived in Stoke Newington.
Ceal Warnants makes prints that look like something your great-aunt Gertrude would have approved of, until you actually read them. Two Edwardian-looking children, perfectly drawn, perfectly buttoned-up — only the placard says RIOT. The little girl in pink looks like she walked out of a 1910s primer; the sign she's holding says FEMINIST. The work is polite on first glance and not at all polite on the second. A new run of her work has just landed at Atom Gallery, and given the energy these prints carry, it deserves a moment.
Who is Ceal Warnants?
Ceal is a London-based artist and printmaker. Her work, in her own words, is "drawn from vintage illustrations which provide an authentic visual language to contrast society's expectations of young people today with the imposing standards of the past." In practice that means hand-printing onto pages torn from actual antique books — Edwardian children's primers, old schoolbooks, the kind of pages that already carry yellowing, foxing and tiny shadows of typeface. The image and the surface are doing the same job: borrowing the visual authority of a polite past to say something deeply unpolite about now. It's been a busy few years. Her collaboration with Coco Fennell — the "Bambi(no)" top — was worn by Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman, which is the kind of co-sign that tends to stick. She's also worked with Mother London, The Londoner, Black & Beech, and is regularly published through Print Club London and Jealous Gallery. The Atom connection isn't brand new — her A5 giclée "Democrazy" was in the Not My Type exhibition earlier this year, and is still in the shop at £50.
Limited edition digital print created by Ceal Warnants on Somerset Paper. Exhibited at the Not My Type exhibition at Atom Gallery 2026.
Artist Ceal Warnants
Edition Size 100
Medium Digital Print on Somerset Paper
Size A5
What's just landed: the Protest Series
Two new relief prints are now in Atom's New In section, both £145 and both part of her "Protest Series" — what Atom describes as work that "explores rights and rebellion in her signature style: an Edwardian children's illustration that, on a second glance, packs a political punch.
Let's Riot (blue) shows two children holding a flag emblazoned with the message to RIOT! This limited edition print is quintessentially Ceal: a sharp political message told in a Edwardian children’s book style. Each work is relief printed onto repurposed antique book pages, so every print in the edition varies subtly in texture, patina and size.
Artist Ceal Warnants
Size ~18.5 X 12.5cm (*20 X 26cm framed)
Medium Relief print on vintage book paper
Edition Size 150
*Only available framed [no unframed option]
"Let's Riot (blue)" shows two children running with a flag that reads RIOT. It's hand-printed in blue ink onto a found vintage book page, edition of 150, signed and numbered. Comes framed; Atom isn't offering an unframed option. Small piece — roughly 18.5 x 12.5cm — but the framing pushes it to a presence that punches above its size on a wall. "The Little Feminist (pink)" is the pink-ink companion: a small girl with a placard reading FEMINIST. Same editionsize, same medium, same framed-only format. The pink ink against the warm tea-stain colour of the antique paper is the kind of pairing that photographs flat and looks completely different in the room.
The Little Feminist (pink) by Ceal Warnants is part of her recent "Protest Series" - work that explores rights and rebellion in her signature style: an Edwardian children's illustration that, on a second glance, packs a political punch! This work is relief printed on repurposed antique book pages, making each print in the edition is slightly varied in texture, patina and size.
Artist Ceal Warnants
Size ~18.5 X 12.5cm (*20 X 26cm framed)
Medium Relief print on vintage book paper
Edition Size 150
*Only available framed [no unframed option]
Each piece in both editions varies slightly because each piece of book paper was pulled from a different page — different texture, different patina, different exact size. That's not a bug; that's the entire point of the project. You're not getting a copy of an image. You're getting a specific page of a specific book that has had a specific image hand-printed onto it. The closest thing to a one-off you can find in an edition.
Why this work hits right now, and where it goes on a wall
There is a lot of "political art" that mainly shouts. Ceal's work doesn't shout. It uses the visual grammar of the most innocent imagery in British print history — the Edwardian primer, the children's book, the schoolroom poster — and quietly hands it a sign. The dissonance does the work. In a room, this is a print that pulls people closer. Small format, framed, hung roughly at eye level — a downstairs loo, an end-of-hallway, the spot above a desk. Anywhere a guest leans in to read. Pair "Let's Riot" and "The Little Feminist" together and you've got a quietly insurrectionist pair of bookends; hang one solo and it becomes the most-talked-about object in the room without doing anything loud. If £145 isn't where you are right now, "Democrazy" at £50 (A5, giclée on Somerset paper, edition of 100) is the cheapest entry into her work currently at Atom — and a good way to get one print in the post and decide for yourself whether you want to go bigger later.