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 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: a designer of wallpapers, textiles, and stained glass whose patterns fill the walls of houses still, a poet and storyteller, a printer and weaver. He traveled twice to Iceland, taught himself the language, and translated the old Norse sagas and Eddas into English, drawn by those heroic landscapes just as he was by the curl of an English vine. He believed beauty ought not belong to the wealthy few but be woven into the fabric of daily life, and 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 made with care and intention. In his later years that conviction grew fiercer still: no beautiful world was possible without a just one, politically and ecologically.
In my life, Morris simply was always there, as certain truths are… in the curving line of a plant stem, in the weight of a hand-stitched hem, in the insistence that a thing made by human hands carries something a machine never can. His refusal to separate beauty from justice has long shaped 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.
