‘Women’s work’ – this is how craft and the decorative arts have long been conceptualised. It is a highly reductive phrase in a patriarchal genealogy of art history that privileges the mind over the body, sight over touch, painting over making, and the individual genius over the work of the collective. In this issue, we […]
Enid Marx (1902-1998) was an influential British designer of the twentieth century. Born in London to an upper-middle class family of German Jewish émigrés, she was educated at the independent school Roedean, Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art.
Seleena Laverne Daye‘s material of choice is felt. The fuzzy texture is the perfect fabric to bring their politically, pop culture driven work to life. As a self-taught artist, Daye creates personal narratives in her art and tackles topics relating to race, class, sexuality and gender. As the co-editor (alongside Em Ledger) of Poor Lass […]
‘Kathy Acker’s use of the first-person singular may have been plural, but it wasn’t communal’, Isabel Waidner announces in their text commissioned in conjunction with the ‘Class, Queers and the Avant-Garde’, an event that was part of a programme accompanying the ICA’s I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker exhibition. Waidner’s event and […]
Eddie Saint-Jean interviews artist Denise Wyllie, a London-based artist whose roots are in working class Haringey
‘One of Audre Lorde’s poems talks about the master’s tools will never dismantle a master’s house. I think there was a real conscious use of imagery to use not the master’s tools but women’s tools, which were traditionally the broom and the vacuum cleaner. It was about looking at power and agency differently, and using […]
With bold colours, pulsating patterns and dynamic figures, the works of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art exude the great vitality and rhythm of modern life in 1930s Britain. This little known group of artists is the subject of the current exhibition Cutting Edge: Modern British Printmaking at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Taking place 90 […]
Gee’s Bend is a small piece of land, surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. In this location, a community have crafted quilts for decades. In 1966, 150 quilt-makers in the rural area formed the Freedom Quilting Bee co-operative. In light of the Civil Rights Movement, this co-op represented a chance to earn a […]
Welcome to the first issue of ‘Decorating Dissidence’, an online magazine dedicated exploring the political, aesthetic, and conceptual qualities of craft and the decorative arts, from the early twentieth century to the contemporary moment.
The Tate’s first large-scale exhibition of retrospective of artist Dorothea Tanning for twenty-five years offers one hundred works from her incredible seven-decade career and leads the viewer from room to room. This is rather apt, as Tanning’s paintings hinge on the transitory. Doors are often left ajar, hanging open…
