A pattern of life, limited edition of 19 linocut prints on fabric, 42cm x 55cm, 2019.

William Morris was a novelist, poet, designer and communist, the founder of the Socialist League and the editor of its newspaper, Commonweal. He thought interior design had a fundamental role to play in the transformation of everyday life. His original hand printed textile and wallpaper designs are highly schematised 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 labour in sight. This is a utopian vision, but one which was acceptable to the upper middle classes and aristocrats of the time: an image of Cockaigne, the medieval mythical land of plenty. Today his work is equally safe and comfortable, and his wallpaper and fabric designs are widely reproduced in machine printed form and can be found furnishing the semis of middle-class England. Nevertheless, they represent the values of arts and crafts movement, and continue to carry within them a trace of Morris’ utopian dream.

The Letchworth plan is from a drawing by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, the architects of Letchworth Garden City. Before Unwin became an architect (and a Christian Socialist) he met William Morris, was an organiser for the Socialist League and occasionally wrote for Commonweal. There are elements of William Morris’ romantic anti-capitalism in the development of Letchworth as well as significant departures from it. Letchworth is partly planned, in an arts and crafts style, to look like a medieval town (yet Morris would have disapproved of this essential falsity). However, the Letchworth plan reveals its recent construction, particularly in the layout of the city centre where the organisation and symmetry are hardly the product of growth across centuries. The symmetry has something in common with Morris’ wallpaper and fabric designs: Morris’ abstracted and stylised representations of nature are comparable with Unwin’s and Parker’s abstract concern for the relative size and spacing of objects in their environment.

In the edition A pattern of life, the Letchworth plan is printed over the Morris design. This combination of plan and pattern produces a picture space that is not fixed, where the Morris pattern and the Unwin and Parker plan are unable fully to merge or separate. Each print uses a different Morris pattern or a different colourway, and different elements of the Morris design have been masked out during the printing process to allow them to emerge through. This makes each print unique.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28063