Event category: Adults

“If Morris saw in the industrialised, stratified and exploitative world of the Victorians ‘sordid, aimless, ugly confusion . . . the dull squalor of civilisation’, imagine what he’d make of the present day. Ecological catastrophe, species collapse, and still the unstoppable obsession with growth, the blind faith in technology as a get-out card. The metaverse, colonies on Mars, microplastics, coups carried out on Twitter: how Morris would have raged and grieved.” Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, 2024

Both Olivia Laing and Jeremy Deller are deeply influenced by the utopian socialism of the artist, writer and activist William Morris. In 2015, Deller curated an exhibition about Morris’s work, Love is Enough which brought together his work alongside Andy Warhol’s. In her new book, The Garden Against Time, Laing explores the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by Morris.

In this special talk at William Morris Gallery, Olivia Laing will be in conversation with Jeremy Deller to discuss Morris’s utopian vision and what it means in our own century of late capitalism and ecological catastrophe.

The event will be chaired by Hadrian Garrard, Director, William Morris Gallery.

• 6.00pm: Doors open
• 6.30pm – 7.30pm: Talk and Q&A
• 7.30pm – 7.45pm: Book signing
• 7.45pm – 9pm: Drinks and Private View

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. She’s written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.

Portrait: Sandra Mickiewicz

Jeremy Deller studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work Memory Bucket and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. His projects over the past two decades, such as Battle of Orgreave (2001),We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016) as well as the documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992( 2019) have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. In 2015 he curated the exhibition Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol at Modern Art Oxford bringing together iconic and rarely seen works by two giants of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Portrait: David Clack

Join us for an exciting evening exploring and expanding on the themes of the book, Mingei / Art Without Heroes. 

Originating in Japan in the 1920s, the Mingei movement was based on the principle that beauty is inherent in handmade, everyday objects created by anonymous craftspeople. Spearheaded by the philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu, and potters Hamada Shōji and Bernard Leach, the movement sought to elevate the status of folk craft in a rapidly modernising society.

Mingei / Art Without Heroes covers a wide range of objects associated with Mingei, from ceramics and furniture to textiles and toys, alongside a series of profiles of leading designers and makers working in Japan today. Contributors from a variety of backgrounds explore Mingei’s origins, interpretations and contemporary implications, shedding new light on the ways in which the principles of the movement remain relevant to today’s personal, social and environmental concerns.

This event forms part of the Mingei on the Move public programme, designed in response to the Gallery’s Art Without Heroes: Mingei exhibition. The programme spotlights the diasporic nature of Mingei and why artists from all cultures and backgrounds are continually inspired by the movement’s ethos.

• 6pm – 6:30pm Doors Open
• 6:30pm – 7:30pm Panel Discussion
• 7:30pm – 9pm Private View

Mingei / Art Without Heroes is edited by Roisin Inglesby and published by Yale University Press. Read more about the book here.

Tomo Yoshizawa is a journalist and cultural translator, based in Japan.

In collaboration with The Japan Foundation.