Richard Wade's art blog: William Morris, Invasive Species and ideolised landscapes

Following on from my previous blog entry I have been playing around with and creating additional experimental work using invasive species as a subject matter. An area I feel that has been particularly interesting and has come out of my practice to date has been the conflict and fallout between the attitudes, ideas and knowledge around invasive species when they were first introduced due to their ornamental and decorative qualities and their subsequent fall from grace to being regarded as an extremely costly pest, nuisance and hazard to the environment. I began to think about additional ways in which it would be possible to try and combine these two sets of ideals.

To start I researched prominent Victorian artists and designers who helped to define the 19th Century. William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) is recognised as one of the most significant cultural figures of Victorian Britain. Associated with the English Arts and Crafts Movement, he was a major contributor to the revival of traditional textile arts and methods of production in Britain.


William Morris, Sunflower Wallpaper

William Morris, Oak leaf Wallpaper

'In choosing natural forms be rather shy of certain very obvious decorative ones, eg bindweed, passion-flower and the poorer forms of ivy, used without the natural copiousness. I should call these trouble savers and warn you of them....we have had them used so cheaply this long while we are sick of them ' William Morris 'Making the best of it'

Morris used nature as his prominent inspiration. His sources were plants themselves, observed in his gardens or on country walks, and also images of plants in 16th-century woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries and other textiles incorporating floral imagery. His designs were not to be literal transcriptions of natural forms but subtle stylized evocations. Of the nearly 600 designs which are attributed to him there are very few which do not feature flowers, leaves, trees or plants.

William Morris, B + W thistle wallpaper

William Morris, Borage Ceiling Paper

Using Morris's floral designs as a starting point I wondered what the result would be by attempting to combine them with some of the dystopic qualities contained within the invasive species collages I had been creating and experimenting with earlier in this unit.

I decided that it would be interesting to retain the circular format of the collages and began by placing some of the patterns from the Morris designs on top of sections of the collages by using Adobe Photoshop and effectively lifting the colours, textures and patterns from the collage in order to create a new composition. I have posted some of the results below:

I think that the results from these four pieces are mixed. Although they have retained the decorative elements which are inherent within the William Morris designs I am not sure whether they contain within them the dystopic qualities that I was hoping to achieve by using the subject matter from invasive species collages. It is possible to make out some of the elements from the compositions however much of the subject matter appears lost and instead it reads as just colour and pattern.

A further idea that I have experimented with for my recent practice relates to the landscape. Having previously created paintings of places using found images which I collaged together in order to create new landscapes, I began to experiment with images of idealized landscapes that I juxtaposed with images of invasive species. Continuing with the theme of the English landscape I began by considering idealized landscapes within the United Kingdom. In order to come up with some imagery I began by using a google search in order to generate some results. The website global grasshopper includes a link to the top ten most beautiful places to visit in the UK: http://www.globalgrasshopper.com/destinations/uk/10-of-the-most-beautiful-places-to-visit-in-the-uk/ although subjective in their nature as to what actually constitutes the most beautiful landscapes in Great Britain I felt that this could be a good place to start. The following four landscapes were the ones that I chose to use as a starting point for my experimentation:

Llanberis Pass, North Wales


Glen Nevis, Scotland

The Jurassic Coast, East Devon to Dorset

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Below are the four images after I have cut up the landscapes and added in the imagery of the invasive species, in order to further break up the surface of the collage. I was much more pleased with the results achieved via this process and felt that they had much more of a dystopic feel to them. The most effective in my mind being the one taken using the Jurassic Coast as a subject and Llanberis Pass North Wales. Some of the ink nozzles on my printer had become partially blocked meaning that the colours of the print out from the invasive species collages had begun to distort and change which helped to add to heightened sense of discordance and unease, while the fragmented juxtaposed sections of the composition complete with the images of the people added to the scene and created an even greater sense of tension and uneasiness.