Talk by David Mabb at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 12 January 2012
"On the Passage of a Few Patterns through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: David Mabb’s Appropriations of William Morris 1999-2011" William Morris thought that interior design had a fundamental role to play in the transformation of everyday life. This essentially political motivation - a commitment to the radical potential of design - is behind much of his work as a designer and craftsman and the setting up of Morris & Co. Morris's designs are highly schematized representations of nature, where it is always summer and never winter; the plants are always in leaf, often flowering, with their fruits available in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labor in sight. Mabb's paintings, photographs, textiles and videos, work with and against Morris's designs by contrasting them with the work of Malevich, the Russian Constructivists, modernist architecture, photographs of industry and recently images of slogans. These combinations produce unstable