An Arts & Crafts Airstream

 

An Arts & Crafts Airstream trailer designed with Morris' Pimpernell, by Bonnie Christine and her husband David.

Read all about it here: https://www.dwell.com/article/renovated-airstream-travel-trailers-4ceccab3 

WMSC Holiday Party 2022

WMSC Holiday Party 2022

Hosted at the Faculty Club, UofT

The WMSC holiday dinner party will be held on Dec. 20, 2022 at the Faculty Club, at the University of Toronto.  This will be a three course sit-down dinner with full plated table service. A bar will be available to purchase wine at an additional cost, credit or debit card only. 

The Faculty Club requests everyone's menu choices for the 3 courses by Dec. 12. They also need to know if there are any food allergies and restrictions. 

You can use the form above to indicate the menu selections for 1 or 2 members, and 1 or 2 guests. Please include the names of individuals, which will help the Faculty Club ensure that the correct meal gets to the correct person. 

Members + Guests

1 Member $75.00 CAD 2 Members $150.00 CAD 1 Guest $85.00 CAD 1 Member + 1 Guest $160.00 CAD 1 Member + 2 Guests $245.00 CAD 2 Members + 1 Guest $235.00 CAD 2 Members + 2 Guests $320.00 CAD

Designing Preservation: Waterways in the Works and Patterns of William Morris

Designing Preservation: Waterways in the Works and Patterns of William Morris

A lecture by Professor Elysia French

Monday Nov. 21 at 7:00 pm EST

Zoom Lecture

‘Wandle', furnishing fabric, William Morris 

   

Historians have demonstrated awareness of William Morris’s environmental ideologies yet have widely ignored this aspect of his work. Morris’s writings on the environment have commonly been described as romantic, escapist, and utopian; if this remains how they are interpreted, historians risk losing valuable insights into the innovative and progressive qualities of Morris’s environmentalism. William Morris’s environmental ideologies were innovative for his time and applicable for today. Through an exploration of his designs, in which he employs the Thames River as a tool of ecological commentary, it will become clear how Morris’s concerns for environmental preservation, freedom, and justice were embedded within his art.

Dr. Elysia French is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University. French is trained as an art historian and studies contemporary environmentally and socially engaged work. Her research is focused on intersections between art and the environment with a particular interest in climate change, the culture of oil, and multispecies relationships.

    She is interested in how cultural producers—those operating within the realms of art and visual culture, community and participatory arts, and activism—are making climate change discourse accessible and relevant to the growing public concern. In recent work, French demonstrated how art is a vital field of inquiry in understanding environmental loss through an exploration of the connections that exist between species and stories. Her current multifaceted and collaborative project, Making (Eco)Logical, brings together diverse perspectives from contemporary artists, activists, curators, scholars and theorists, who explore the ways in which art informs perceptions and communications of environmental and social injustices associated with environmental change.

Enola Holmes and the Arts and Crafts Movement

 

Enola Holmes (2020)

As trends come and go, William Morris designs dance between on-trend Maximalism to evocative Victorian patterns, used in film and TV to suit whichever narrative. With a keen eye for Morris prints, you too can see them pop up in anything from Stranger Things to Riverdale to Bridgerton, and also in Enola Holmes.

The film is set in the late 1880's, and follows a young Enola Holmes (sister of Sherlock Holmes), on her coming-of-age journey. The ancestral home of the Holmes is Ferndell Hall, a mansion that evokes both boisterous Gothic ornament and old manor home decor, and an Arts & Crafts aesthetic. Dark wood panelling suffuse the home and carved finials on many surfaces with heavy patterns and dark colours are accompanied by floral and wildlife motifs. Bird and Pomegranate is a Morris & Co pattern from 1926, but evokes the heavy ornament of the Victorian period the film is set in, lightened by the birds and fruit of the pattern that draws attention to the study of flora and fauna that Enola and her mother have made as their private language with one another. 

  Bird and Pomegranate, Morris & Co, 1926

Throughout the film Enola dons a series of disguises, she ends the film in a dress that evokes Arts & Crafts paintings, while also looking to the future and the Edwardian silhouette. Rather than the voluminous skirts and bustles of the 1880's, her silk gown is leaning more into the 19-teens. 

 

Enola Holmes (2020)

The dress can be inferred to draw its inspiration from the Aesthetic Dress of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose medieval-inspired clothing called for the drape of a smooth garment that skims the body, usually with voluminous sleeves and embroidered decoration. 

Kate Elizabeth Bunce, The Keepsake (1901)

John William Waterhouse, Ophelia (1894) 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Salutation of Beatrice (1859)

Enola's dress shows off decorative embroidery (interestingly the making-of which she scorned earlier in the film) without it overwhelming her in decoration. The dress allows for an ease of movement (which she demonstrates by riding a bicycle, an expression of free movement of the period) and sets her apart from the heavily decorated garments in fashion of the day.

Enola Holmes, 2020

Liberty of London/Paris silk gown, c. 1890's

1913 dress, Netherlands

Musings by: Lera Kotsyuba

Lera Kotsyuba is a board member of the WMSC, and is an art and architecture historian and critic. 

Kate Elizabeth Bunce and Women’s Engagement with Arts & Crafts

 

Kate Elizabeth Bunce and Women's Engagement with Arts & Crafts

A lecture by WMSC Member Azadeh Monzavi

October 20, 2022, Time: 7:00 PM EDT

Zoom Lecture

The Keepsake, Kate Elizabeth Bunce

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

This 1901 painting is based on a poem by Rossetti and was first shown with this quotation:

'Then stepped a damsel to her side,

And spoke and needs must weep:

'For his sake, lady, if he died,

He prayed of thee to keep

This staff and scrip'.

    Kate Elizabeth Bunce was a Birmingham-born artist associated with the later phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Her work and contribution to that movement have been acknowledged by scholars such as Jan Marsh. This paper argues that although her paintings have been discussed in publications focusing on Pre-Raphaelite art and the Arts and Crafts movement, Bunce’s work invites renewed attention for its unique character which bridges stylistic elements of these movements and Aestheticism. In paintings such as The Keepsake (1898–1901), Victorian preoccupations with morality, gender roles and sexuality are artfully cloaked in Medievalist notions of religious piety, feminine fidelity and male chivalry. Her use of historicized allegorical themes and symbols are made modern through her subtle engagement with the growing popularity of hand-crafted techniques as championed in the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Keepsake also illustrates the late nineteenth-century fashion for ‘Aesthetic’ dress even as it references the historical influences of Medievalism on such styles. The figure of the Queen is adorned with a silk dress decorated with hand-embroidered griffins while her attendant wears a similarly quasi-medieval gown fashioned in a bold printed fabric reminiscent of patterns designed by Charles Francis Voysey for Liberty’s. At the turn of the century, viewers of this painting would have recognized its historicism while simultaneously appreciating the artist’s attention to changing notions of contemporary fashion and ornament. Ultimately, this paper highlights Bunce’s cognizance of history and modernity by drawing attention to the nuanced way The Keepsake straddles closely connected, yet distinct artistic movements.

Azadeh Monzavi is a WMSC board member and a Ph.D. student and interdisciplinary maker/researcher in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds an undergraduate degree in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Fashion from TMU. Her doctoral research investigates intergenerational and transnational bonds between women, mediated through aesthetic and personal objects of significance drawn from the interconnected fields of textiles, craft, literature and art. Her research explores the decolonizing potential for textile practices as a form of media for communication and connection within broader discourses of intersectional feminism and visual culture.

Members Only: AGM and The Arts & Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest

Annual General Meeting and

The Arts & Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest

Thursday, September 22, 2022
via Zoom at 7:00 pm EDT

An illustrated lecture by Lawrence Kreisman following our A.G.M.

During his 1909 lecture tour to America’s West Coast, British architect and designer C. R. Ashbee wrote in his journals that Seattle was “the only American city I have so far seen in which I would care to live.” His wife, Janet, remarked on the city’s cosmopolitanism, its “well-appointed restaurants decorated with the latest Arts and Crafts distinction of line and colouring.” Their comments reveal that the Pacific Northwest was participating actively in the design reform movement that had roots in nineteenth century Britain and was taken to heart by America.

Encouraged by exposure at two world’s fairs that put the Pacific Northwest on the national and international map, significant contributions were made to a broad range of design arts, influenced by the remarkable setting, climate, local raw materials, crafts of native inhabitants, and exposure to Pacific Rim cultures.

Based upon his award-winning book with co-author Glenn Mason, Lawrence Kreisman examines architecture, interior design, furniture, decorative and applied arts, photography, and fine arts that demonstrate the remarkable variety of progressive, architect-designed residences, bungalows for everyone, and all manner of artistic and practical furnishings and accessories that were the handiwork of anonymous amateurs and significant regional artists alike.

Lawrence Kreisman, Hon. AIA Seattle, was Program Director of Historic Seattle for 20 years, He has been recognized for significant work in bringing public attention to the Pacific Northwest’s architectural heritage and its preservation through courses, tours, exhibits, lectures, articles, and 11 books. In addition to The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, publications include Apartments by Anhalt; The Stimson Legacy: Architecture in the Urban West; The Bloedel Reserve: Gardens in the Forest; Made to Last: Historic Preservation in Seattle and King County, Dard Hunter: The Graphic Works, and Tradition and Change on Seattle’s First Hill: Propriety, Profanity, Pills, and Preservation, as well as hundreds of design features in The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine and national magazines Style 1900, American Bungalow, Arts & Crafts Homes and the Revival, Old House Journal, Old House Interiors, and Preservation. Kreisman and his husband, Dr. Wayne Dodge, have been members of the UK Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present since the mid-1980s and collect 1890-1930 furniture, decorative, and applied arts, books and design journals of Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and the US. 

 

WMSC Lecture: The Dragon and the Smith

It's a beautiful day to hear all about Morris, Tolkien, and Sigurd the Volsung!

The Dragon and the Smith: William Morris, JRR Tolkien and the Legend of Sigurd the Volsung
An illustrated lecture by Dustin Geeraert, U. of Manitoba.

In the 1860s William Morris and the London-based Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon began translating Icelandic sagas into English. They soon published the first ever translation of Völsunga saga, as The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, in 1870. This archetypal Norse dragon-slayer dragon-slayer legend inspired a range of later poems, prose tales, and articles by William Morris and by his successor in Norse-inspired medievalism, J. R. R. Tolkien. Both medievalists immersed themselves deeply in the Norse legacy of Eddas and Sagas, and in response cultivated a Romantic philosophy of craftsmanship. In their various versions of the Volsung legend two figures stood in stark contrast in the roles of creator and destroyer: the Dragon and the Smith.

Dustin Geeraert teaches literature in the English and Icelandic departments at the University of Manitoba. He is editor of ‘The Modern Reception of the Medieval Saga of the Sworn Brothers’ (Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 26, 2019) and The Shadow Over Portage and Main: Weird Fictions (2016, with Keith Cadieux), and has published articles in Journal of the William Morris Society (2012), The Lovecraft Annual (2014), Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2018), and From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination (2020).

For further reading, Dr. Dustin Geeraert's book, 'Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature' is now available: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781800106093/cultural-legacies-of-old-norse-literature/

Find more of Dr. Geeraert's writings on Morris in 'Useful & Beautiful', a William Morris Society US publication, available here: https://morrissociety.org/publications/useful-beautiful/