A Selling Exhibition of Today's Designer Makers
I am currently participating in this exhibition, which has now become an annual event.
What is it that we do when, as ‘designer-makers’ we make a table? What, through the table, do we seek to exhibit? Why do we define our exhibition by reference to furniture-makers in small workshops, in the southern English countryside a century ago, producing ‘wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind’? ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’ are labels that now we are comfortable neither to abandon nor wholeheartedly adopt. ‘Designer’, though now fading from its recent almost universally positive currency, was an offspring of Arts and Crafts through a Balhausian intermediary, where it acquired its renunciation of ornament. Ornament, not universally eschewed by the Arts and Crafts makers, troubles us still. Now that we can make in so many ways (the kind of technical virtuosity that got the Victorians into trouble) we are tempted (as always following the architects) to differentiate our work through form, which can sometimes be as much ‘applied’ as the decoration of the Victorians. Such thoughts are pursued elsewhere on this blog.
The Millinery Works
85/87 Southgate Road
Islington
London N1 3JS
020 7359 2019
20 March to 1 May 2011
closed Mondays and Easter
further details at http://www.millineryworks.co.uk/
