Works in Progress was a changing exhibition of design drawings curated in collaboration with young people from the local community. Designed as a continual work in progress, with objects being added and taken away each month, the exhibition focused on the process of design from work on paper to finished object.
​
Wiliam Morris created over 600 designs for textiles, ceramics, wallpaper, books, and stained glass. The exhibition featured examples of Morris’s pioneering approach to design, centred on layers of flat, abstracted pattern, alongside work by his colleagues including Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Better known as painters, design drawings by Burne-Jones and Rossetti raise questions about the line between so-called ‘fine’ art and the craft skills that Morris championed.
The exhibition showed how design drawings are instrumental in the process of making a wide range of objects, charting the transition from 2D drawing to 3D object.
​
The three iterations of the exhibition, each developed by a group of young people, were held at the William Morris Gallery from August 2020 to January 2021.
​
I wrote about the project in the Museums Association Journal.
​