The Science Museum Group's collection centre at the Hawking Building. It holds over 300 000 objects from across the Science Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, National Rail Museum and the National Science and Media Museum.
@scienceinnovationpark
The Hawking Building is the Science Museum Group's collection centre. Over 300000 objects under one roof in the @scienceinnovationpark View over the large object collection
Morris Mania. How Britain’s greatest designer went viral
@morrisgallery Closes 21st Sept
William Morris (1834-96) has gone viral. His infinitely-reproduced botanical patterns appear on shower curtains, phone cases, on film and TV, and in all corners of our homes, dentist waiting rooms and shopping centres.
Morris argued beautiful objects could only be created through a responsible and close relationship with the natural world and enjoyable, creative working conditions. These principles continue to influence subsequent generations of designers, makers and consumers today.
Morris Mania explores a complicated legacy. Over 125 years since his death, his work continues to grow in popularity. His patterns are affordable, well-loved and available worldwide, something he failed to achieve in his lifetime. However, this has been achieved in the context of mass-production, computer-generated design, global capitalism and environmental crisis.
Morris Mania considers the ongoing impact of Britain’s most iconic designer in our increasingly commodified world.
Objects from William Morris Gallery and private and public collections include a ‘Rose’ patterned seat from the 1980s British Nuclear Submarine Fleet, ‘Willow’ pattern Nike trainers, and Loewe inspired by Morris’s designs. The exhibition also features objects donated by the public revealing how the designer’s work has permeated our everyday lives. Donations to date include chopsticks, a waving cat from Japan, hand-embroidered wedding jackets, Wellington boots and an array of mugs and biscuit tins.
The exhibition features Wallpaper by archive documentary filmmaker Natalie Cubides-Brady, exploring how William Morris’s designs have been used in screen history - in everything from My Fair Lady, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Django Unchained, to Gogglebox, Coronation Street and Peep Show, highlight how Morris designs form part of the fabric of 20th- and 21st-century popular culture.
Curation: @hadrian2000
Exhibition design: @samjacobstudio
2D Design: @europaaporue
(Good) Pics @lewiser
Vermiculated Rustication Vent (1)
Red House Vent (2)
While working on environmental upgrades to the William Morris Galley, we needed to make some new vents to allow new airflow through the building. This was necessary work to bring down what had been very high temperatures in the galleries - damaging to the collection objects and unpleasant for visitors and staff.
Given the context, however, we couldn't use normal vents from screwfix. Instead we made some Morrissan vents - both beautiful and useful. The vents for the museum reprise the perforated patterns in the Red House ceilings, the pin pricks in the plasterwork acting as guides for William and Jane Morris and their friends to hand paint patterns. Surely a vent is a more appropriate William Morris based product than the usual museum shop slop.
And given the opportunity to think about vents as significant design moments, we began to think of other evocations that might elevate the practical to something … more. Next up was the Vermiculated Rustication Vent. This kind of pattern, usually found carved into stone at the base of a building (eg at the Palazzo Medici) is thought originally to suggest a sense of mortality, as if worms were eating away at the body of a building just as they do to a buried cadaver. A kind of architectural memento mori. What better way to think about bodies, life and death than in the ways in which buildings engage with the environment?
Array was a large scale installation in the atrium of the Science Museum. Commissioned to accompany the Sun exhibition, the design evokes an abstracted idea of sun rays.
Coloured cables were suspended within the atrium, arranged as if emitted from a single point.
Colours and lighting effects were used to help suggest crepuscular rays streaming through gaps in clouds.
Commissioned by @khibbs for the @sciencemuseum with lighting by @dhadesigns and installation by @stageoneltd
