The future needs the past: remaking William Morris through contemporary art practice

In partnership with the William Morris Gallery, London, this practice-based research revolves around the impact of the past within the present, as explored through traditional, mechanical, and digital processes. This project views notional time as repetitive, with historical time understood through technological cycles, and by a kind of shuttling between the Industrial Revolution (and specifically the advances in industrial manufacture during Morris’s era) to today’s Digital Revolution. This temporal shuttling is manifested in my practice by shifting both temporally and spatially between past and present; moreover I use cyclical processes as the work shifts in mode from hand to machine, into digital and back to the hand. The destabilising of apparent binaries of art/craft, analogue/digital, ancient/modern, authentic/ copy is important to my approach. Connections are drawn between archives from the William Morris Gallery and my own collections of both found and inherited materials. In this respect, I am concerned with how personal archives can be viewed alongside Morris’s wider historical English heritage in a post-industrial, digital age. In current times of rapid technological advancements - as with the Arts and Crafts Movement - the revival of traditional materials and ways of making has become a significant trend in contemporary art. For example, I refer often to the proliferation of textile or thread-based craft processes, stemming from those my mother used and echoing those of William Morris. This interweaving of perspectives on the past can be said to emerge from my mixed British/Greek-Cypriot heritage. Hence this project builds on aspects of the concept of hauntology, which is concerned with the continual impact of the past within the present, and the oscillation of absence and presence of temporal revenants. As I explore within, the notion of contemporaneity echoes hauntological speculations about a lost future which ensues from our persistent gaze towards the past. Thus, I offer an understanding of ambivalent contemporaneity through a material perspective, via an assemblage of multiple authors, temporalities and technologies.