Post-digital ornament
Craft arises through richly mediated connections to tangible qualities that may not require or achieve object or spatial representations, and that nevertheless reward skillful practice
– McCullough, 2015
Helen McCormack, Reader in Art and Design History
While Modernism diminished much of the language used previously to explain ornament, our project revisits and reanimates vocabularies and meanings of ornament and decoration, many of which were abandoned in the early twentieth century, to reveal new and original interpretations for the twenty-first century.
The project is a collaborative research exercise, combining designer-makers, creative practitioners, artsits, craftspeopoe, historians, critical theorists and curators, all of whom are interested in imagining and understanding new forms, materials, and asethetics emerging from the application of technologies throughout creative disicplines. We are keen to demonstrate how methods relating to historical, critical and interpretive analysis might come together with practice-based enquiry to create dynamic, expansive, and generous, approaches to materials and aesthetics, through investigation of affective experiences, historical distance, time, and technology. The initial aim of the project is to investigate contemporary craft and design practice which re-examines historical critical theory; examine how new object morphologies might be understood through ‘re-distancing’ historical timeframes, particularly in previous interpretative theories, as ‘ornament has once again advanced to the status of legitmate means of artistic expression as the vehicle for content or messages ...’ (Lindemann & Trier, 2011).