Illustration: Ernest Gimson. Embroidery design.
Ernest William Gimson is probably best known for either his hand produced furniture design or his architecture. The English designer is particularly well-known and valued today as an important innovator within the later English Arts & Crafts movement. His work within the realms of sustainability, localised accountability and longevity has given his creative design work a particular contemporary emphasis. With our need to find other solutions to replace the troubled and ultimately unsustainable economic framework that had become relentless by the mid-twentieth century, one that needs to position itself outside of the realms of consumer inspired fashion and consumption, Gimson seems an ideal candidate.
Placing design and decorative work outside of the context of the fashion market, is often difficult to maintain, particularly when considering the general buying public and their misconceptions when dealing with hand production. Many see hand produced furniture design to be prohibitively priced and only available to those with enough economic power to indulge their preferences. Although this is true on a surface level, it is also true that one piece of hand produced furniture could well outlast a single lifetime and would indeed probably be sturdy enough to last generations beyond that. A typical mass produced piece of furniture would be lucky to last a decade, many last a lot less than ten years. To count up the investment made in paying for repeatable furniture every decade and the initial investment made in hand produced furniture does tend to reveal the fabrication of the cheapness of mass production, along with its perceived economic necessity.
An interesting example of decorative work that could be considered as outside of the fashion remit, and could therefore be termed timeless, is the example illustrating this article. It is a decorative patterned piece meant for embroidery and was produced by Gimson. Although it is within the realm of the English Arts & Crafts movement, the design could have been produced in the sixteenth century or indeed the twenty first. It has no emotional bond with any particular era and no means of tying it to a fashion statement.
However, it is by no means a pastiche as it genuinely appears to be an observational record of plant and floral life used within the context of decorative pattern work produced by an individual creative. While it is always tempting to presume that all decorative and design work is fashion led, and while that is true of a proportion of work produced in Europe over the centuries, it will always be true of only a proportion.
To understand Gimson in particular and the Arts & Crafts movement in general, is to understand the potential of other systems of working, particularly within the context of hand and machine production. To see the machine and its replacement of hand production as a struggle between man and monster is largely missing the point. It was only ever one issue of many that were endemic to England. Many in the Arts & Crafts movement in England in particular, used the popular movement as a platform for a range of ideas concerning the dismantling of the economic, financial and social structure of England, much of which is still largely in place and still as unequal as it was in the last half of the nineteenth century when the English Arts & Crafts movement was at its most influential.
The dismantling of consumer led fashion through the introduction of design and decoration that was meant to be cross-generational, proved particularly difficult for the movement. Fashion, by its very nature, appeals to and relies on divisions in society, whether they are led by age, finance or even geographical area. To persuade a customer that an expensive non-fashion led item is infinitely superior to that of the cheaper fashion-led one goes against many of the tenets of modern society, particularly those concerned with capitalism.
Capitalism uses choice as its marker of success as well as its tool of seduction. However, as we are all aware, fifty choices of nearly the exact same item is not really a choice, it is a matter of small increments of variation, often too small to matter. This is not to say that choice in its own right is a crime. However, truly creative and individual choices are perhaps infinitely preferable to that of the feeling of endless similarity that is often found in mass production consumer led fashion.
Perhaps it is time to see the work of contemporary design and decoration as that between a choice of creative individuals, some of whom work within mass production, some in hand production, some in both. By making informed choices from the standpoint of individual creativity, rather than those produced through pressured company advertising, a semblance of balance between what we admire creatively and what we need to consume, can be achieved. It is better to buy and cherish an individual well-balanced and harmoniously creative piece of work, whether that be practical or non-practical, than to be compelled through a combination of advertising and consumer led fashion into purchasing half a dozen instantly regretted items that bear no real connection to the individual or their real character.
Further reading links:
Ernest Gimson and the Cotswold Group of Craftsmen: A Catalogue of Works by Ernest Gimson, Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, and Peter Waals, in the Collecti (1978 Leicestershire Museums Publication; No. 14)
Gimson and the Barnsleys: Wonderful Furniture of a Commonplace Kind (Art/architecture)
GIMSON AND BARNSLEY: A CATALOGUE OF DRAWINGS BY ERNEST GIMSON, SIDNEY BARNSLEY AND OTHER DESIGNERS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT.
Ernest Gimson
The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century
The Arts & Crafts Companion
The Arts & Crafts Movement
The Arts and crafts movement
The Arts and Crafts Movement (World of Art)
Arts & Crafts Design
Textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World 1880-1920
The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest
Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement (Dallas Museum of Art Publications)
Stickley Style: Arts and Crafts Homes in the Craftsman Tradition
Beautiful Necessity, The
The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876-1916
