William Morris Gallery: Visits - Woodblocks

William Morris, woodblock for Tulip textile design.

The gallery has a large collection of the original woodblocks in their archives. Beautiful objects in their own right, I love the variety of surfaces used for different sections of the designs. Each leaf of the design appears to hold a whole tree. Metal fins like mushroom lamellae or gills are employed for linear detail. 

www.mushroomexpert.com has a description of the function of the mushroom's reproductive blades:

'Gills (called "lamellae" in Mycologese) are the many platelike or bladelike structures attached to the underside of the cap in some mushrooms, representing an ingenious reproductive strategy. Like all mushrooms, gilled mushrooms are spore factories, created for the sole purpose of manufacturing microscopic spores to be carried away by air currents and, with any luck, to land in a suitable location to germinate and start a new organism. The odds of any individual spore having this kind of luck, however, are so low that the mushroom produces millions of spores to compensate. The gills are assembly lines, and they dramatically increase the number of spores the mushroom can produce. Both sides of each gill are covered with microscopic spore-producing machinery. Imagine the difference in the number of spores produced if the underside of the cap were simply a single, flat production surface; far fewer machines could operate!'
Michael Kuo.

Pleasing that Morris's hand-made, hand-tool-machines for mass production share an aesthetic with biological spore factories. In the studio, the project is tuning in to focus on the reproductive parts of plants, as analogous to industrial mass-production. Giant anthers as architectural pollen factories, containing hive-like cross-sections with pollen 'dynamite'. More on that in another post....

Another block for the same design has a soft, baize-like surface, for blocking in an area of background colour. The head of a poppy seed case in the gallery gardens, presents itself as a ready made printing block.

Populations of small pins provide a stippled pattern to the design and with the peaks and troughs of the chiselled wood, viewed side-on or from above, appear as a landscape and city topography; and the the sandwiched layers of wood make me think of layers of vegetal sediment in the formation of coal.


With thanks to Anna Mason and Rowan Bain who have facilitated the visits and generously supported the research.

William Morris Gallery - Visits to the Archives

Pamphlets:

Over the last few months I've been visiting the archives and reading room at William Morris Gallery, Waltham Forest, to research Morris and his relationship to industry.

Much of his writing can be accessed online, although there's something pretty special about sitting in a house that Morris once inhabited, reading his words in pamphlets that are among some of the earliest printed copies of his essays and lectures.

There's a kind of poetic pomp to his prose. His passion and conviction is clear, while his choice of words and turn of phrase sometimes made me smile and perhaps shift a little uncomfortably in my seat; in particular his repeated reference to 'miserable make-shifts'. I can't help wondering what he might make of my own cardboard make-shifts.

         






























A Factory As It Might Be - some excerpts:

Morris describes the potential for factories to be 'Palaces of Industry', standing in the middle of beautiful gardens. Of the industrial buildings and factories, Morris says, they are 'almost always at present mere nightmares....[which] sufficiently typify the work they are built for, and look what they are: temples of overcrowding and adulteration and over-work, of unrest....'. If, reasons Morris, factories become places of 'reasonable and light work, cheered at every step by hope and pleasure...', it's therefore reasonable to expect that the architecture reflects this:

'...Our buildings will be beautiful with their own beauty of simplicity as workshops, not bedizened with tomfoolery as some are now, which do not any the more for that hide their repulsiveness; ...besides the mere workshops, our factory will have other buildings which may carry ornament further than that, for it will need dining hall, library, school, places for study of various kinds, and other such structures; nor do i see why,,, we should not emulate the monks and craftsmen of the Middle Ages in our ornamentation of such buildings; why we should be shabby in housing our rest and pleasure and our search for knowledge, as we may well be shabby in housing the shabby life we have to live now.'

'So we have come to the outside of our factory of the future, and seen that it does not injure the beauty of the world but adds to it rather.'

'Our factory, then, is a pleasant place....our factory stands amidst gardens as beautiful (climate apart) as those of Alcinous, since there is no need of stinting it of ground, profit rents, being a thing of the past, and the labour on such gardens is like enough to be purely voluntary....and our working people will assuredly want open-air relaxation from their factory work'.

'Most factories sustain today large and handsome gardens...; only the said gardens...are, say, twenty miles away from the factory, out of the smoke, and are kept up for one member of the factory only, the sleeping partner...'.

'Now as to the work, first of all it will be useful, and therefore, honourable and honoured; because there will be no temptation to make mere useless toys, since there will be no rich men cudgelling their brains for means for spending superfluous money, and consequently no "organisers of labour" pandering to degrading follies for the sake of profit, wasting their intelligence and energy in contriving shares for cash in the shape of trumpery which they themselves heartily despise'.

'...machines of the most ingenious and best approved kinds will be used when necessary, but...used simply to save human labour...'

'...now the attractive work of our factory, that which was pleasant in itself to do, would be of the nature of art; therefore all slavery of work ceases under such a system, for whatever is burdensome about the factory would be taken turn and turn about, and so distributed, would cease to be a burden - would be, in fact, a kind of rest from the more exciting or artistic work'.

The factory would be a centre of education where children would receive technical instruction amidst their book-learning.

'...our factory, which is externally beautiful, will not be inside like a clean jail or workhouse; the architecture will come inside in the form of such ornament as may be suitable to the special circumstances. Art, pictures, sculptures should adorn a true palace of industry'.

'This our Socialistic factory, besides turning out goods useful to the community, will provide for its own workers work light in duration, and not oppressive in kind, education in childhood and youth. Serious occupation, amusing relaxation, and more rest for leisure of the workers., and with all that beauty of surroundings, and the power of producing beauty....'.


With thanks to Anna Mason and Rowan Bain who have facilitated the visits and generously supported the research.