Pattern and Decoration
パターン・アンド・デコレーション / 1975–1985 / Style / Ornament
A movement that argued head-on with modernism's premise that ornament is inferior. It brought the repetitions of Islamic geometry, quilts, wallpaper and textiles onto large canvases and placed women's handwork and non-Western idioms at the centre of art. The starting point for treating decoration as a political question.
Repeating pattern covering the whole surface / Quotation of quilts and textiles / Reference to non-Western ornament / All-over composition without borders
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Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Surface and packaging systems in textiles, hospitality and cosmetics where the identity is a repeating field rather than a mark · Cultural programmes and publications that need ornament to carry an argument about whose craft counts
- Type
- Type set inside the pattern at the same visual weight as the motif, so that nothing sits on top of the decoration.
- Composition
- An edge-to-edge repeat with no frame and no focal point, the format read as a cut from an unbounded field.
- Material
- Fabric, print or tile whose repeat is honest, the join left visible, with unrelated patterns allowed to meet.
- Caution
- Using the pattern as a border around a modernist white centre, which reinstates precisely the hierarchy the movement set out to overturn.
- Further study
- Its connection to feminist art / The counter-argument to ornament as crime / The re-evaluation of textile history