HLATC: Inspiration

"A Modern Take on William Morris"

by Jennifer Moore

Emelia Haglund, a first-semester MFA student in the Textile Studies department, was a student in Lisa Frank’s Textile Design: Manual/Computer Generated Imagery and Pattern course in the fall of 2008. During the semester Professor Frank’s class made numerous trips to the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection to view textiles from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century.

During one class session the students viewed textiles from both the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau design movements. Emelia was particularly inspired by a William Morris (1834-1896) textile with a pattern known as “Honeysuckle.” Morris, a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, was a British architect, furniture and textile designer, and artist whose career spanned the height of the Industrial Revolution. While many of his contemporaries were captivated by the promises of the new machine age, Morris immersed himself in Persian art and the close observation of nature, twin sources of inspiration that he transformed into dense, intricate textile and wallpaper patterns. The “Honeysuckle” pattern, conceived in 1876, continues to be reproduced in both textile and paper media. In patterns such as “Honeysuckle” the floral imagery, ogee-shaped tendrils, and clusters of foliate forms, create a world of wonder and inspiration.

William Morris

Emelia

Image courtesy of Emelia Haglund

Emelia admired the visual power of this textile and was inspired to rework the composition. In keeping with another of Morris’ celebrated contributions, a return to handicraft and traditional techniques, Emelia began by making a copy, by hand, of the pattern from a book of William Morris prints. She superimposed a grid over the image and enlarged it by three hundred to four hundred percent. Emelia then replicated the pattern at its newly enlarged scale. From this point she modified the shapes, morphing the flowers and tendrils into octopi and tentacles. While the background of the Morris print is densely populated with pattern, Emelia simplified her background to include scattered tiny squid that are still reminiscent of Morris’ delicate Persian-inspired flowers. In addition, she extracted some aspects of Morris’s original color story but updated it by adding boldly contrasting colors.

Emelia’s design is noteworthy both for its innovation and dynamism as well as for its acknowledgment and celebration of Morris’ classic composition. Enabling students to produce design work that is both forward-thinking and reverential, modern and historically informed is an important part of the mission of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, which strives to make important historical textiles available for study by UW-Madison students and faculty.