... an exhibition of 'Comtemporary Craft'. ( I was quite excited at the prospect... dear son was less so, but we went anyway.)
The house '78 Derngate' is the only house in England designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It's an interesting little place in all kinds of ways. It's a Georgian terraced house that was bought for Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke as a wedding present and in 1916 Charles Rennie Mackintosh was commissioned to remodel it.
Over the years it's had many owners one of them a school - so it's had a hard existence. But, in the last few years it's been painstakingly restored to it's orginal state using what photographic evidence remains of the orginal design. The incredible geometric screens inlaid with with glass and MacKintosh's designs were stripped back to the original - that involved removing alomost 17 layers of paint! (Glad that didn't involve me in anyway!)
I feel that this post would be better if I could just illustrate it all with photographs but as is often the way - they were forbidden. Even natural light was forbidden in some rooms of the house, just in case it faded and rotted the textiles. So, I've taken a few photographs from the visitors leaflet but they really are a poor second to the real thing.
Textiles. Yes, even the textiles were designed especially for the house. the curtains in the living room were hand block printed in India. Fascinating. All in black wavy geometric lines filled in with richest purples. They would look extremely modern even today. Sadly, a lot of this was viewed by artificial light and even torchlight, because of fear of the damage natural light might bring.! A bit of a shame because obviously it's very difficult to appreciate colour in artificial light.
The guest bedroom was something else.
the guest room ....
Strong black and white geometric lines around the room and the coverlets on the beds were beautiful... jewel colours contrasting with the black and white lines, saphhire blues edged in jade green and every now and then there was a dash of red making a wonderful, singing colour scheme.
There's a lot of yellow and black designs in this house which apparently came as a result of the owner being colour blind to all colour apart from yellow and anywhere were MacKintosh might have used one of his iconic rose designs.
The one thing that really stood out about the house for me was that it seemed incredibly modern. The interior seemed completely out of step with the Georgian facade of the terraced house .... and yet ....
Despite being unable to see it in natural light, it was a fascinating visit and I suspect that some of those colour combinations are going to have some impact on me for quite a while...
The 'Sewing and Growing exhibition', which was the other reason for the visit, was being held in the Gallery. The bags; tote bags, wash bags, handbags and purses were all from one designer (Teresa Green) and were all made of linen in a stone colour, featuring her own bird print in red. She was also selling linen tea-towels and aprons, featuring the same bird design.
... pretty little felt birds...
The felt jewellery by Lynsey Walters was lovely. Felt brooches; birds, flowers with buttons and embroidery were all extremely colourful and extremely charming.
An interesting little craft exhibition but it seemed a shame that there was so much empry space... the room was large and contained the work of two people..... I'm thinking that there are probably a lot more people who could have helped use that space. But... it's a step in the right direction .... craft capturing a bit of limelight.
the house sounds fasinating and the felt jewellery realy looks fabulous. A great day out!
Posted by: two hippos | March 08, 2009 at 12:00 AM
My daughter recently did an Art project on Rennie Mackintosh - I enjoyed it as much as she did. For her Graphics module, she's just done some work on The Bauhaus School - again, I just loved it! x
Posted by: Kitty | March 08, 2009 at 12:00 AM