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.