Construct 69, Morris, Daisy / Stepanova, Optical, paint on paper, 70cm x 50cm, 2019.

Construct 69 combines two machine printed Morris & Co. wallpapers with the design Optical derived from a textile print by Varvara Stepanova. Morris and Co. was a design company founded by William Morris, a late nineteenth century English writer, designer and Socialist activist. Morris & Co.’s work included wallpapers of highly schematised representations of flowering plants, now widely reproduced and found in ordinary middle-class English houses, where they represent the utopian traces of the English Arts and Crafts movement. In contrast Varvara Stepanova was an artist and designer who worked in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s as part of the Constructivist movement. The Constructivists’ abstract machine aesthetics supported the transformation of everyday life in the fledgling USSR, an aim which became unrealisable with the rise of Stalin and totalitarianism. Construct 70 reanimates these two distinct languages and fragments of history, fusing them to suggest renewed possibilities for emancipation.