Designing Women: highlights the ongoing role of female designers

The National Gallery of Victoria is holding a large-scale exhibition on female designers recently. This exhibition showcased more than 70 works of female designers from 1980 to 2018. Lighting, furniture, product design and fashion design, also architecture and contemporary jewelry. In this exhibition, about 50 female designers showed visitors their practical achievements in the design industry. [1]

Through this exhibition, visitors can learn more directly about the participation and contribution of female designers in the design industry in the past 40 years. Because of the social alienation of women for a long time, the status of women in society has been lower than that of men. One good example is that although women designers have contributed to the design industry, their status in the past few decades has been far less prominent than that of men. From the beginning of the twentieth century, more and more women began to receive education in design and art. At that time, modernism, which emphasized style and new technology, remained as the mainstream cultural ideology. People believed that the design industry was about machinery and technology. Therefore, due to the inherent impression of women in society, which is opposite of masculine, most people think that women are not suitable for this industry.[2] Then with the development of the times, more and more people began to change their ideas about design, which attracted more and more female designers to enter the industry.

Dress 2016 autumn-winter, Rei Kawakubo

In this exhibition, each work has their own unique style and source of inspiration. Female designers show different aesthetics from mainstream male designers in their works. In this exhibition, visitors can see that most of the designs have bright colors and distinctive shapes.

La La Lamp, Helen Kontouris

Among the exhibition varieties, what attracted me most was a floor lamp consisting of two cones. The lamp called La La Lamp, designed by Helen Kontouris, one of Australia’s most famous product designers in 2004. The floor lamp consists of two conical structures covered by a red coated fabric lampshade.[3] While realizing the basic function of desk lamp lighting, it also has a very strong decorative unique appearance, which is hard overlook.

Helen Kontouris is a female designer from Melbourne with more than ten years’ experience. She is known for integrating organic forms and imaginative elements into traditional concepts.[4] ‘Her approach often takes traditional, linear concepts and combines a fluid feminine sensibility inspired from a narrative informed by her travels’.[5] Kontouris believes that the object in design is to combine the functional and the decorative of products in equal parts. She feels she brings a structure to her work that is both feminine and organic, along with “a certain lightness and a textural quality”.[6]

Softscape Chaise Lounge, Helen Kontouris

As one of Australia’s most successful product designers, Kontouris has not received a complete education on product design. She first entered the design industry as an interior designer, and after several years of work did, she bravely turned to product design, which people usually believe is a male-dominated industry.[7] However, all this did not affect her success. She is a regular at Milan Design Fair and London Design Fair. Her works also attract a lot of media coverage and huge press coverage. In Kontouris ‘s works, people can feel the unique sensitivity and delicacy of women. However, in the early design industry, because of this unique characteristic of women that women have been marginalized in the design industry.

In recent decades, as more and more women begin to receive the education of design and art, and women designers have made continuous efforts in the industry, more and more women designers have become the object of attention. From the exhibition of designing women, we can see that women designers are not affected by the unfair treatment they suffer. On the contrary, in every work, we can feel the unique charm of designers as women and the efforts made to create a more inclusive industry environment.

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Bibliography

[1] NGV. DESIGNING WOMEN. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/designing-women/ (accessed April 27, 2019).

[2] Simone LeAmon, Designing Women https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/designing-women/ (accessed April 29, 2019).

[3]La La Lamp  http://www.helenkontouris.com/projects/la-la-lamp/ (accessed April 29, 2019).

[4] Australian Open NGV Room designed by Helen Kontouris http://interiordesignermagazine.co.uk/2018/02/08/australian-open-ngv-room-designed-helen-kontouris/ (accessed April 29, 2019).

[5] Australian Open NGV Room designed by Helen Kontouris http://interiordesignermagazine.co.uk/2018/02/08/australian-open-ngv-room-designed-helen-kontouris/ (accessed April 29, 2019).

[6] ibid

[7] Jan Howlin, “Indesign Luminary: Helen Kontouris,” Indesignlive,2019, https://www.indesignlive.com/the-peeps/indesign-luminary-helen-kontouris-3 (accessed April 29, 2019).

Forgotten Heroes of Design: May Morris

May Morris? who was she? Wasn’t she related to William Morris? If this is the questions you have when you hear the name, relax, you are not alone. May is the younger daughter of William Morris, the famous English textile designer, writer, socialist and one of the leaders of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Even though May is a designer with great achievements, her achievements are so eclipsed by her famous father, and even many of her works are considered to come from his father, William Morris. For more than a century, she had stood in the shadow of her father, which made her own achievements invisible, even now, few people know her.

May Morris was born in 1862 in the red house of Bexleyheath. She was the younger daughter of William Morris and Jane Morris.[1] She grew up surrounded by some of the Victorian’s most famous artists and designers. She studied textile art at South Kensington School of Design from 1880 to 1883. Because of her excellent embroidery skills, she became the director of the embroidery department at Morris & Co when she was only 23 years-old in 1885 and started supervising every new design. After her father, she continued to play one of the most important roles in the British arts and crafts movement.

Honeysuckle, May Morris, 1883

The famous wallpaper design Honeysuckle is almost impossible to tell at first glance how it differs from others classics design by William Morris. In the light-yellow background, intertwining woody stems, curling leaves and fluted flowers interweave to form an amazing complex pattern. Honeysuckle was designed in 1883 and it still remains a bestseller to this day. However, this famous wallpaper design was actually designed by May. After many years of sailing under the “William Morris” flag, archival studies have shown that tit was actually the work of his daughter May.[2]

Although this kind of work hovering between botanical literalism and stylized motif, which is similar to most of William Morris’s works, however, if you look closely at this work, you will find that the different between May’s and her father’s. Although the use of plant elements is similar, Honeysuckle can be seen to be airier and less oppressive than other works by William Morris. The honeysuckle showed in May’s design is one of the most common plants in British cottage gardens.

Tapet bird & Pomegranate, William Morris

Different than May, her father, William Morris often used exotic pomegranates and acanthuses in his designs. ‘Unusually for a Morris wallpaper, there is no sense that you are in danger of being mugged by a triffid.’[3] Another similar example is Horned Poppy, which have been regarded as William Morris’s works for many years as well. After many years, their attribution has changed from William Morris to May. Rowan Bain, the curator of William Morris Gallery, explained that though the design may have been published under his name because it was more profitable at the time. And Honeysuckle is now thought to be one of May Morris’s first independent designs.

As one of the most important figures of the arts and crafts movement, May has never received the same praise as his father. At that time, the members of the he Art Workers’ Guild were only open to men. As a feminist and socialist, May was previously frustrated by the lack of support from female practitioners. In 1907, she founded the Women’s Art Association and set the goal of ” to keep to the highest level the arts by which and for which we live”[4].

“May helped elevated embroidery to an art form.”, curator Rowan Bain said.[5] Unfortunately, at the beginning of the modernist movement, minimalist design aesthetics has replaced artistic and technological styles, and people believe that products should not carry more functions than design requires. People who advocate modernism think that the decorative patterns contrary to the concept of “less is more” are superficial and deceptive. Contrary to the aesthetic taste of modernism,’ essence and reason’, ‘decoration and sensibility’, which are often associated with women, has received more obvious criticism than ever in the period of modernism.

Even today, more than a century later, there are still many great female designers like May, but they are not known by people. Still, lots of female designers are standing in the shadow of this male-dominated industry. But with the change of people’s aesthetic diversity and the improvement of social inclusiveness, as well as the courageous voice of women designers for their rights, the environment of the design industry has begun to change dramatically.

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Bibliography

[1] Nick Salmon, The William Morris Internet Archive : Chronology, https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/chrono.htm (accessed May 1, 2019).

[2] Brooke Baerman, MAY MORRIS AND THE POWER OF MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS, https://sites.udel.edu/materialmatters/2018/03/14/may-morris-and-the-power-of-museum-exhibitions/ (accessed May 1, 2019).

[3] Jan Marsh, Feminist, socialist, embroiderer: the untold story of May Morris, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/25/may-morris-the-designers-daughter-determined-not-to-be-outdone (accessed May 2, 2019).

[4]Maev Kennedy, May Morris: the designer’s daughter determined not to be outdone, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/25/may-morris-the-designers-daughter-determined-not-to-be-outdone (accessed May 2, 2019).

[5] Brooke Baerman, MAY MORRIS AND THE POWER OF MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS, https://sites.udel.edu/materialmatters/2018/03/14/may-morris-and-the-power-of-museum-exhibitions/(accessed May 1, 2019).