I.4.1 Within/Without the Home: The Colonial Imperative and Modern Domestic Furniture Design

• Julie Hollenbach, NSCAD University

In 1913, Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray was commissioned by Jacques Doucet—Parisian couturier and collector of French art and African ethnographic artefacts—to create several pieces of lacquered furniture for his new apartments, including the Lotus Table (1913) now considered an important example of early Art Deco furniture. Two years earlier, in 1912, Doucet sold his extensive collection of 18^th and 19^th-century fine and decorative art for a vast sum, using the profit to finance his interest in collecting Modern art as well as collecting masks, vessels, and other hand-made objects that came to France through the French invasion and colonization of Algeria. Doucet desired that his new apartment on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne showcase his new collection. Doucet understood that the salon in his home would need to support the material and aesthetic sensibility of his new collection by integrating and emulating its qualities. He thus invited several interior and furniture designers to come and study the Modern art paintings and ethnographic objects in his collection in order to create furnishings that would suit the purpose of accompanying and displaying the collection in Doucet’s home. Gray’s Lotus Table is one example of the outcome of this relational activity. Records show that Gray found her visits with Doucet’s collection to be inspiring and provocative, and the impact of Doucet’s collection can be seen on Gray’s subsequent designs, as well as on the products of other designers who visited Doucet’s collection and designed furnishings for his home.

Often when objects, such as Gray’s Lotus Table, are viewed today by the public in the ahistorical and apolitical spaces of modern art and decorative art museums, almost all traces of the social, cultural, and domestic context that influenced and necessitated their design and creation are absent/removed. This paper’s case study demonstrates how the “salvage paradigm” (James Clifford, 2008) and the colonial imperative played out in private collecting practices and domestic arrangements, and how the individual domesticity of one influential person had an impact on early twentieth-century modern design more broadly.

keywords: domesticity, Modern design, colonial imperative, collecting, museum display

I.4.2 Transplanted: Ruptured Notions of Home in an Early Canadian Quilt of Embroidered Sprays (1849)

Vanessa Nicholas, Concordia University

This paper speculates that select Victorian Canadian women may have used domestic craft to reach beyond the bounds of the home and engage with broader questions of place. The subject of this paper is the Fallowfield quilt (c. 1840s), which was likely made by Irish settler Elizabeth Bell (1824-1919) in the village of Fallowfield within Canada West’s Carleton County sometime before her marriage in 1849. Many of the embroidered floral sprays that make Bell’s quilt so distinctive are popular British motifs and can be contextualized within the broad cultural identification with flowers that was felt by many in the British colonies. Significantly, the quilt’s sprays seem to be inspired by an early modern British embroidery convention that derived from the first natural science texts. Suitably, Bell has incorporated what appears to be a unique motif onto her quilt top that resembles the red trillium flower indigenous to the temperate woodlands of eastern North America. This instance of plant identification was certainly influenced by the amateur naturalist tradition that formed part of settler colonial efforts to habituate to new locales. Expressing Bell’s nostalgia for the British countryside as well as her commitment to the unfamiliar Canadian landscape, the Fallowfield quilt represents the fragmented attachments that complicated notions of home for settlers in nineteenth century Canada. This paper will further consider how the British ideals exhibited within Bell’s quilt disrupted Indigenous ecologies and communities in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Valley regions.

keywords: craft, embroidery, flowers, Victorian, home

I.4.3 Becoming One: the amalgamation of home and craft

• Sabine Wecker, University of Regina

Craft and Home: This is a concept that is tangible in the life and artistic work of 20th Century female immigrant ceramic artists like Lucie Rie (1902-1995) and Marguerite Wildenhain (1896-1985). Rie was trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Wildenhain one of the rare woman in the ceramic studio, was educated at the Bauhaus State School, Weimar. The rise of Nazism in the German speaking countries in the Xirst half of the 20th century, forced artists like Rie and Wildenhain out of their homes into migration. They had to rebuild not only their successful careers and their concept of ceramic craft practice, but also their homes. The re-creation of both were tightly interconnected, resulting in an amalgamation of home and craft for these women. Both women created ceramic vessels as holders of memory, vessels that embodied the continental European modernist aesthetic and craft tradition, and provided a familiar structure to help conceptually re-build the places they were forced to leave behind. Home was not separate from their craft practice and studio, home was their studio space and located in the act of making. For Wildenhain home also included her Pond Farm summer school where she taught an approach, modeled after her Bauhaus education. Interestingly, both chose what they were familiar with, Rie chose the urban studio in London (GB), whereas Wildenhain’s physical home was placed on wild rural land in Northern California. Both women were incredibly independent, both were divorced and childless, and determined to follow with dedication the ceramic craft in a male dominated ceramics culture. They created the only possible environment to do this, a safe and familiar studio/home, and they dedicated their lives to it, both, staying in their homes and practicing their craft until the end of their lives.

keywords: craft, home, ceramics, feminism