What does a William de Morgan lustreware vase from the 1870s have to do with a block-printed linen textile made by Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher in the 1930s? Tracing the making practices, exhibition spaces, and critics that link these two objects, the talk explores how the category of craft was constructed and navigated in Britain between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Second World War. It focuses in particular on the writing of May Morris and follows her example by paying attention to the complexity of the decorative surface.
Biography
Imogen Hart completed her PhD at the University of York in 2007. Her book Arts and Crafts Objects, based on her doctoral research, was published in 2010. She has co-edited two collections of essays: Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (2010), with Jason Edwards, and Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (2020), with Claire Jones. Recent publications include a special issue of Art History on ‘British Art and the Global’ (2022), co-edited with Dorothy Price. After fifteen years in the United States at the Yale Center for British Art and the University of California, Berkeley, Imogen returned to the UK last year. She is the newly appointed Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Craft. Current research projects include a book, Critical Histories of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which she is co-editing with Thomas Cooper.
Followed by a drinks reception
(open to all)
