“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