12 January Lecture, David Mabb’s Appropriations of William Morris 1999-2011
David Mabb
Reader in Art, Goldsmiths, University of
London
Thursday, 12 January 2012
6.00pm, Kenneth Clark Lecture
Theatre
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R
0RN
On the Passage of a Few Patterns through a Rather Brief Moment
in
Time: David Mabb’s Appropriations of William Morris
1999-2011
William Morris thought that interior design had a fundamental
role to
play in the transformation of everyday life. This
essentially
political motivation - a commitment to the radical potential of
design
- is behind much of his work as a designer and craftsman and
the
setting up of Morris & Co. Morris' designs are highly
schematized
representations of nature, where it is always summer and never
winter;
the plants are always in leaf, often flowering, with their
fruits
available in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labor
in
sight. Mabb's paintings, photographs, textiles and videos, work
with
and against Morris' designs by contrasting them with the work
of
Malevich, the Russian Constructivists, modernist
architecture,
photographs of industry and recently images of slogans.
These
combinations produce unstable picture spaces that are never
fixed,
where a Morris pattern and the other image never merge or
separate.
This lecture has been organised to accompany the exhibition
William
Morris: Story, Memory, Myth which is open until 29 January 2012 at
Two
Temple Place . The exhibition draws upon the remarkable collections
of
the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, which is closed for
major
refurbishment until July 2012. Organised in collaboration with
The
Courtauld Institute of Art, this exhibition is the first in the
annual
series of exhibitions by The Bulldog Trust which are intended to
draw
on and increase the visibility of collections across the country,
and
to provide opportunities for young and emerging curators.
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