Collection: William Morris Inspired

Woven From the World He Loved

There are those who walk through life and those who look at it... who study the way a vine curls along old stone, or how a bird's wing holds its color against the morning sky, and think: this matters, and I will not let it be forgotten.

William Morris was such a man. Born in England in 1834, he became one of the great makers of the Victorian age. He was a designer of wallpapers and textiles and stained glass, though his patterns fill the walls of houses still, a hundred and fifty years on. He was a poet and a storyteller, a printer and a weaver. He traveled twice to Iceland, taught himself the language, and translated the old Norse sagas and Eddas into English... the Volsunga Saga, the Grettis Saga... drawn by those heroic landscapes and ancient stories just as he was drawn by the curl of an English vine. He believed that beauty ought not belong to the wealthy few but be woven into the ordinary fabric of daily life. He stood against the grinding ugliness of the Industrial Revolution with his hands and his vision both, arguing that the human spirit requires honest craft... quality work made by hand with care and intention. And in his later years, that conviction grew into something fiercer and even larger: a belief that no beautiful world was possible without it being a just one, both politically and ecologically.

I will not pretend I came to Morris through any schooling. He simply was always there, as certain truths are. He was in the curving line of a plant stem, in the weight of a hand-stitched hem, in the stubborn insistence that a thing made by human hands carries something a machine never can. His way of seeing the natural world and his refusal to separate beauty from justice have long been part of how I understand my own work. The earth is worthy of attention. The people who tend it are worthy of dignity. And what we make with our hands, when we make it truly, is a kind of argument for both.

These pieces are offered in that spirit.... with more to come.

The William Morris Society