I’m delighted to have been invited by the Pugin Society to give its 2024 AGM lecture at the Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London. I last met up with the Pugin Society when its committee member for Web and Print Design, Dr Jamie Jacobs, gave a lecture at the Palace of Westminster drawing on her PhD on Pugin at the University of Kent, which I supervised. I wrote about Dr Jacob’s talk here. Dr Jacobs has now kindly suggested me as a speaker, for the Pugin Society. She and secretary David Bushell felt I might have something up my sleeve that I could share with the Society and they were right. I am grateful for this opportunity to talk about an aspect of my research for The Hand Book, a design history of hands, with a group of Pugin experts.

The title for my talk is “Pugin to Papercuts, Ruskin to Ryan, Walthamstow to Wandsworth: Design Reform and Socially-Engaged Contemporary Art Practice.” While this title displays perhaps too much enthusiasm for alliteration, it at least communicates the links I’m making. My talk draws on the ideas of three influential nineteenth-century design reformers, AWN Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris, to examine two instances of 21st century creative practice: the socially and politically engaged papercuts of Rob Ryan, and the Wandsworth Quilt, made by prisoners for the V&A collection. The location for the lecture is extremely fitting because two of the figures that I will discuss, William Morris and Rob Ryan, were/are Masters of the Art Workers Guild.

Pugin Society members will know better than most that Pugin was an early critic of the effects of industrial manufacture on design. He dictated that only the ‘essential form be decorated,’ that flat patterns should be used instead of illusionistic representations.[1] Although Ruskin claimed never to have read Pugin, and criticised him in print, his influence on Ruskin’s thinking is clear.[2] Ruskin’s ‘On the Nature of the Gothic’ (1853) decried the dehumanising effects of industrialisation. Ruskin responds directly to Adam Smith’s writing on the division of labor: ‘It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments’.[3] Morris followed Pugin and Ruskin in ascribing a moral value to the applied arts. He set an agenda for the Arts and Crafts movement, championing the applied arts and crafts as being equal to fine arts, in the medieval tradition, and seeing art and design as a social salve.

Installation view of Rob Ryan's Papercut "Let People Live! Cap Rents in London" hung on the stairwell of the William Morris Gallery, Lloyd Park, Walthamstow on the occasion of Ryan's 2019 exhibition there. Photograph: Grace Lees-Maffei.

The Morrissian legacy in papercut artist Rob Ryan’s work is seen in the messages communicated through practice which melds art, design and craft. As I’ve said, Morris was Master of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1892, while Ryan is Master for 2024. Although papercuts were not among Morris’s extraordinary creative range, he is described as a printer among several other areas of practice in his AWG listing, and Ryan is a fine art printmaker as well as a papercut artist. Ryan explicitly addresses making in his work thematically and demonstratively through his command of paper cutting and silkscreen printing. Ryan’s 2019 exhibition at Walthamstow’s Morris Gallery, which I wrote about here, tackled housing inequality in London, a political stance appropriate to the setting and to Morris’s social and political concerns about poverty and the place of the artist-designer in society.[4]

In 1851, the year that the vast Great Exhibition spearheaded by Prince Albert and Henry Cole at what became known as the “Crystal Palace” designed by Joseph Paxton, architect of the greenhouses at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, in London’s Hyde Park — HMP Wandsworth was built as one of the largest prisons in Europe. The V&A is part of the Albertopolis cultural quarter on South Kensington’s Exhibition Road, named for the Great Exhibition and leading up to its site in Hyde Park. The South Kensington Museums were developed in part with profits and objects from the Exhibition, with the V&A having its first incarnation as the teaching collection of the South Kensington School of Art. In 2010, around 40 inmates from Wandsworth’s Onslow wing participated in the HMP Wandsworth Quilting Group, led by the social enterprise Fine Cell Work, to produce a contribution to the V&A exhibition ‘Quilts 1700-2010’ curated by Sue Prichard, then curator of contemporary textiles at the museum. The HMP Wandsworth Quilt (top) gives voice to prisoners, and describes their experiences, thoughts and feelings about incarceration, about their prison, and about stitching.

These two creative examples differ in important respects: one is a solo creation, the other is a group effort; one is paper-based, the other is stitched into fabric; one is the output of a professional papercut artist, the other is the result of a project with amateurs. But, each of the outputs foregrounds the process of making by hand within the context of socially-engaged progressive politics. The lecture draws on part of a chapter on Handicrafts that I’ve written for The Hand Book, my current project, which seems from ym vantage point as writer in progress, almost as vast as the Crystal Palace. I hope the members of the Pugin Society will enjoy my lecture for the links it makes across centuries and media.

Pugin Society webpage promoting the 2024 AGM, Lecture and Festive Tea. Web design by Dr Jamie Jacobs.

[1] AWN Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture.  London: John Weale, 1841, p. 1, p. 8, p. 28.

[2] Conner, Patrick R. M. 1978. “Pugin and Ruskin.”  Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41: 344-350, p. 344.

[3] John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of the Gothic’ (1853), The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, The Sea Stories, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10, edited by E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, pp. 180-269, London: George Allen, 1904, reproduced in The Design History Reader, ed. Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze, pp. 60-64, Oxford: Berg, 2010, (reprinted London: Bloomsbury 2013), p. 63.

[4] ‘Rob Ryan’, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London, 20 October 2018 to 27 January 2019.