The exhibition Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art, 150 Years brought together a collection of unique hand-printed wallpaper artworks by designers Laura Slater and Fraser Muggeridge, alongside a selection of items loaned from the collection of Wakefield Museum.
Although on first inspection an unlikely combination, the installation pays creative homage to the Wakefield Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition of 1865. One of many exhibitions held nationally following the Great Exhibition of 1851, this event celebrated the breadth of creativity and invention of Wakefield, bringing together works of art, industrially manufactured items, amateur crafts, raw materials and much more, all loaned by the citizens of Wakefield.
This exhibition and installation were both a 150th-anniversary tribute and a creative exploration of what the spirit of the original show might mean to a 21st-century audience.
Slater and Muggeridge’s wallpaper design took its inspiration from motifs and elements that featured on the original 1865 exhibition poster. Scaled up many times and transferred to screen-print production, the paper uses small details, individual letters, punctuation and printer’s marks to create a series of repeated forms, which filled the entire walls of the gallery, but never quite recur the same way twice.
Objects included some of the items from the 1865 exhibition, including exhibitor medals and a bound volume of material relating to the show. Other objects from the same date were selected to illustrate some of the many categories of the event, representing some of the over 1300 items shown in 1865.
At that time, as The Art House began to breathe new life into a historic Drury Lane Wakefield library building and opened its doors to many new creative individuals with the creation of more studio space, the project was perfectly placed to re-evaluate what it takes to form a creative community and identity for Wakefield. The installation aimed to raise questions about what defines someone as an artist or designer, and what that means to a wider society.
The commissioned wallpaper took inspiration from the typographic form and message of the 1865 poster, however, by changing that form, the project aimed to share a new message; a message of collaboration; of the importance of process and production to meaning in a digital age; and individuality in an era of global production.
With special thanks to Wakefield Museum.
Laura Slater’s wallpapers were ink screenprinted onto paper. She created four bespoke, striking wallpaper designs that were hand-printed and hung as a backdrop to the exhibition.