Page 117 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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William Morris: textile-designs from c1875
Morris was a formative part of the movement for the re-discovery and regeneration of traditional English crafts - in textiles, furniture, printed books, stained-glass, ceramics, silverware and glassware (etc). This was called the Arts and Crafts Movement, and dominated design in England from around the 1880s, made famous internationally by the commercial exposure and success of Morris textiles and arts and crafts furnishings at Liberty & Co (the shop near Regent Street in central London). Morris was a modern, research-based designer, conceiving and sketching early stages of his patterns - including drafting the repeats - then using professional illustrators and printers to finesse his designs. He was also a Socialist and Medievalist, an early environmentalist, a writer, poet and scholar - a formative influence on the evolution of design and design methodology in this country and abroad. He was without a doubt, the single most important designer of the Victorian era.
Of course Morris would have known Owen Jones’ comprehensive Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856, but his work largely depended on his own observation of nature and his drawings that were a selection and abstraction from nature. “He revitalised the traditional arts of dyeing and textile production. Setting up the decorative arts company Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in 1861, Morris studied and re-introduced traditional methods of dyeing and hand printing textiles while also selling tiles, stained glass, furniture and home furnishing to the growing middle classes.” (Matt Payton: The Independent 2016).
Walking in the English countryside, you can’t help but be aware of Morris’ profound influence - every hedge-row, every coppice, every ivy-clad wall is redolent with images that echo his designs. It’s like walking through Morris’s brain...and it changes every season, every day...