Rolls of a lifetime for Morris & Co

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” William Morris told a Birmingham audience in 1880.

The designer, writer and socialist, who was born in 1834 and became a key exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement with peers such as Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was especially influenced by medievalism and the belief that handmade objects, both functional and ornamental, held spiritual as well as aesthetic value.

To counter the mid-19th century trends for naturalistic, factory-made wallpapers, he set up Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in 1861 with elegantly stylised designs based on nature.

This show sets out to demonstrate the historical and aesthetic contexts of Morris’s work and to showcase not only the designs and their origins but also aspects of the manufacturing process.

A series of tableaux shows domestic environments with furniture, wall coverings and other design elements, while tasteful wall paints made by the still extant Morris & Co provide a kind of colour-coded backdrop, guiding visitors through a sumptuous, tastefully styled experience.

The result, if you have the time to read the many well-researched panels and to absorb the complex designs, is an absorbing experience that satisfies the mind, eye and soul. The show, curated by Mary Schoeser — an authority in textiles — and co-ordinated by Dovecot’s Kate Grenyer, is inspiring, creating a thirst for knowledge about Morris and his colleagues, such as John Ruskin.

The centrepiece is a roll for the Chrysanthemum design of 1877, recreated in 2018, which is accompanied by hand-operated wood blocks from which the prints are derived. The impressions from a series of six blocks, when printed over one another, combine to create the final design, rather like a screen print. It’s fun to mentally deconstruct the process and satisfying to understand how it works.

This show, just the latest in an excellently conceived and presented series, is a credit to the venue and its staff, and a must-see for anyone with even a passing interest in the extraordinarily rich history of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Until June 11, dovecotstudios.com