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| 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.
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.
