Event category: Exhibition

Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary artists. Through his work he explores the concept of time, incorporating original material made around the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 with his trademark “Miyajima numbers”. For his latest work, Miyajima has collaborated with William Morris, using his iconic Bird fabric from 1878 to create a new work in the series.

Supported by the Japan Foundation

Tapestries have always told stories. In this exhibition 16 women artists from the UK, USA, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Japan weave the stories of our time: the possibilities, the hopes and lost chances.

Woven tapestry is formed from the most basic construction: using a loom, the maker forms a design through tightly packed horizontal threads (the weft), which cover vertical threads (the warp). To weave a tapestry is an intensely intimate act; the weaver must concentrate on tiny areas at a time, building shape upon shape of imagery, colour and narrative until the final, and usually large scale, work is completed. Historic examples of tapestry range across time, and across cultures, including the 4th or 5th century Coptic (Egyptian Christian) tapestries with their bold imagery, the highly complex early 16th century European tapestries telling the story of The Lady and The Unicorn, right up to the present day. In each historical instance, tapestry has always been used to tell stories of the time.

Using traditional hand woven tapestry techniques that connect us to the past, the artists included in ‘Weaving New Worlds’ have drawn on contemporary images and events, personal dreams and feelings, bringing the art form into the 21st century through their vibrancy and subject matter.

The tapestries range in subject matter, from reflections of rural mythologies, to floods and urban decay. The featured artists are notable for continually pushing the boundaries of their craft, and in some cases this is the first UK presentation of their work. Norwegian artist Mari Meen Halsøy has been working for the last eight years in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, a city marked by violence and political unrest. For decades bombed buildings with countless bullet holes have stood as monuments to the ravages. Halsøy weaves, on site, patches for the ‘wounds’ of the buildings, as an act of metaphorical and actual healing. Her tapestry Snipers Room is exhibited here for the first time in the UK.

Also on display is British artist Pat Taylor’s portrait of Kim Jong-un, taken from her recent series of tapestry portraits. Preoccupation with physiognomy has been a constant theme in her work, stimulated by current and sometimes physically distant events. By using physiognomy as the linchpin, stories are expressed through the landscape of the subject’s face.

American artist Erin M. Riley will present a new work in this exhibition, reflecting a thematic change from her ‘Selfie’ series and the sexually explicit tapestries for which she is well known. Her work Head On references her childhood in which she grew up in a town in Cape Cod, Massachussetts, that had a markedly high rate of drunk driving accidents and related deaths, causing her to make a significant choice from a young age not to drink. Always at the heart of the work is the human condition, the artists offering us both a utopian and dystopian view – the choice is ours.

Curated by Lesley Millar, Professor of Textile Culture and Director of the International Textile Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts in collaboration with National Centre for Craft & Design and William Morris Gallery.

A catalogue of the exhibition is available here

Image: Ripples & Ribes by Jennie Moncur, 2015 ©The Artist

“Patterns and words and pictures, pictures and words and patterns, I don’t want them to live apart and segregated. It’s always been my aim to somehow weave them all together to keep each other company, nobody in the world should have to feel alone.” – Rob Ryan

A solo exhibition of work by renowned fine artist Rob Ryan, featuring highly patterned original papercuts and limited edition silkscreen prints created in response to the William Morris Gallery’s collection. To accompany the exhibition, Rob has designed and produced a range of exclusive merchandise for the Gallery shop. The range includes ceramics, glassware and a limited edition lasercut.

William Morris was a key figure in the development of domestic garden design, helping to popularise the Arts and Crafts garden among the artistic middle class in England and the US. His gardens at Red House and then Kelmscott Manor supplied endless inspiration to Morris, his family and friends.

The Enchanted Garden explores how Morris’s contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists – from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Bloomsbury Group – have responded to the allure of garden spaces, using them as stages for the magical, menacing and romantic.

Many works in the exhibition reference real gardens that still enchant visitors today, including Morris’s Red House and Kelmscott Manor, which supplied endless inspiration for him, his family and friends.

Featured artists include Claude Monet, Lucian Pissarro, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Beatrix Potter, Cicely Mary Barker, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell.

The exhibition is organised by the Laing Art Gallery in association with the William Morris Gallery.

Image: Claude Monet, Water-Lilies, Setting Sun, c.1907 © National Gallery, London

Lola Lely (designer and textile artist), Laura Anderson (sculptor and woodcarver) and Harriet Warden (illustrator and printmaker) come together to seek ways in which the designs and traditional processes synonymous with William Morris can find artistic form and relevance in the contemporary and culturally diverse setting of Walthamstow in 2019.

Local printmaker Kirsten Schmidt is inspired by our connection to nature, and the urban spaces where we can make these connections.

This exhibition celebrates the artist’s respondes to Lloyd Park, home of William Morris Gallery, and other green spaces in the borough.

Madge Gill was born in Walthamstow and spent most of her years living in East London.

A self-taught, visionary artist, she created meticulous artworks, many of which she attributed to Myrninerest, her spirit-guide that she came to embody.

This landmark exhibition in her home town brings together drawings, newly uncovered large-scale embroideries, textiles and archival objects, many of which have never been exhibited before.

Accompanying Madge Gill is an exhibition by the celebrated French “outsider” artist Marie-Rose Lortet, whose work has been greatly influenced by Gill’s. On display will be Lortet’s distinctive embroidered masks and fabric sculptures.

In 1942, Chairman Mao Zedong declared that all art should serve the worker, peasant and soldier. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) this policy was vigorously implemented.

Images of the leader appeared everywhere: bold, colourful posters combined text and image to promote political messages. The predominant colour was red – colour of the revolution – and when Mao was shown, it was always amid a glowing light.

Traditional landscape styles were reimagined and now incorporated symbols of modern and industrial achievement. Even the traditional folk art of the delicate papercut, used to decorate windows at home, promoted ‘Mao Zedong Thought’.

This exhibition displays a selection of Cultural Revolution propaganda posters, revolutionary landscapes, images of the leader and intricate papercuts all of which were collected in China during the 1970s.

This is a touring exhibition organised by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Haiku Adventure: The Craft of Games explores the intersection between traditional Japanese woodblock prints and videogames – two different media separated by centuries and yet linked by a common sensibility.

Small Island Games present the development of their ‘indie’ title Haiku Adventure, juxtaposing its creative process with its artistic influence: the ukiyo-e prints of Edo-era Japan. The display follows on from the Gallery’s 2017 exhibition, Sheer Pleasure: Frank Brangwyn and the Art of Japan, which was formative to the game’s conception.

This exhibition showcases original Japanese prints alongside interactive game displays and an overview of the development process, allowing visitors to experience a modern adaptation of an ancient craft.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an exhibition of new portraits by American artist, Kehinde Wiley. This is the first solo exhibition of new work shown by Wiley at a UK museum and also the first to feature exclusively female portraits. The works feature women that the artist met on the streets of Dalston and offer a visual response to American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s acclaimed feminist text, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

‘The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of literary fiction that explores the contours of femininity and insanity. This exhibition seeks to use the language of the decorative to reconcile blackness, gender, and a beautiful and terrible past.’ — Kehinde Wiley

Gilman’s text is a semi-autobiographical tale which sees her narrator confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with hysteria and explores the disastrous consequences of denying women independence. In Wiley’s new portraits, each woman is positioned as autonomous, as powerful, as open to individual interpretation and as an emblem of strength within a society of complicated social networks. They wholly embody myriad positions with regard to social class, status, religion, colonialism and the negotiation of gender.

For over fifteen years Wiley has sourced William Morris’s iconic floral designs for his paintings. Building on his interest in the relationship between the human body and the decorative, Wiley’s models are depicted in reimagined fields inspired by the William Morris oeuvre. Wiley’s portraits offer a rubric through which to engage with the beautiful yet fraught histories and traditions that black women — and all women — are heir to.