Charlotte Hodes THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT New Papercuts and Ceramics This project has been informed by the or merely a word triggered visual associations. influential book The Grammar of Ornament In the papercuts the female figure appears as by the architect and designer, Owen Jones, a protagonist serving to undermine and originally published in 1856 and republished disrupt the rigidity of the hierarchical system as Decorative Ornament by Black Dog and as presented by Jones. Leventhal in 2006. The series of dishes draw upon the These papercuts correspond to, and are imagery developed in the papercuts numbered according to each of the original providing a step further away from the rules thirty-seven propositions which form the of the propositions. The form of a dish situates ‘general principles in the arrangement of form the imagery firmly within the and colour in architecture and the decorative domestic domain rather than the lofty arts’. Each proposition provided a starting iconography of architecture and grand design. point, in some cases the entire proposition was taken on while in others, a single phrase, Charlotte Hodes OPPOSITE PAGE: Details from thirty seven papercuts, 2013-14 Charlotte Hodes 2 3 Charlotte Hodes THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT: NEW PAPERCUTS AND CERAMICS DR. JANET McKENZIE historic ornament, and to formulate a design language that was Hodes’ response. A pillar or tower creates a central form between appropriate to the modern world. The Grammar of Ornament is two figures, with small blocks of design in grey and black on the prefaced by 37 general principles of design pertaining to the left side contrasting with the multicoloured, densely collaged arrangement of form and colour in architecture and the blocks on the right side. These multicoloured blocks echo the decorative arts, the first of which asserts: “The decorative arts arise page layout and jewel-like colours in The Grammar of Ornament, from, and should properly be attendant upon, architecture.” in which images of tiles and patterns are lavishly reproduced side Ornament, he maintained, should never compete with by side. Hodes uses another Hayes’ swatch, as well as fragments of In The Grammar of Ornament: New Papercuts and Ceramics, the Jones, who was born in London in 1809 (d. 1874), was one architecture. He urged artists and designers to embrace the floral pattern from her Proposition 1 Architecture. She then cuts artist Charlotte Hodes takes as her cue the seminal 19th-century of the most influential design theorists of the 19th century and technology to develop a new, modern style, not by reviving old into the sheets of patterns to disrupt the sameness of digital-print publication The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by the architect and a pioneer of modern colour theory. He was responsible for the styles or techniques, or by copying designs found in other surface, building up cut and pasted layers, and applying paint to designer Owen Jones1 to investigate the relationship between interior decoration and layout of exhibits for the Great Exhibition cultures, but by analysing the styles in order to grasp their enhance the surface quality. The zigzags in the Hayes design are the female form in painting and the decorative arts. Acting as a building of 1851, where his paint scheme, which was limited underlying design grammar. Charlotte’s response to echoed by the use of a zigzag cutting method and around an platform from which to interrogate both 21st-century design and to the primary colours, blue, red and yellow, generated much “Proposition 1” uses as its background a digitally manipulated edge, creating the effect of dressmaker’s pinking shears, a feminism, Hodes dismantles idea and form by using collage and criticism and debate. Through his close association with Henry scan of a fabric swatch from Hayes Textile Ltd Collection, from the reference to a traditional female activity. Cutting paper also pro- papercut techniques to disrupt images, thus creating Cole,3 Jones played a pivotal role in the formation of the Victoria archive of the London College of Fashion. The whole is printed on duces mirror images, ready to place within the composition – in multifarious new directions and possibilities. The female form and Albert Museum. His audacious new principles became the a large-format printer and the lines from an architectural horizon this case, the figure to the left of the tower, who has been flipped occupies each of the 37 paper works, and in the ceramic dishes is teaching framework for the Government School of Design. The line are then imposed using a scalpel. The cut lines also resemble and repeated – and dashed lines are then also repeated by the languid and idle, an ironic aside to the painstaking and design propositions also formed the basis for The Grammar of the screen of an electrocardiogram, implying human life in the cutting-out process. time-consuming techniques employed by the artist herself. As Ornament, a compendium of 19 styles of historic and world balance. The figure absorbs and contains ornamental forms; she is A key source of inspiration for Jones’s book was Islamic Hodes’ first dialogue with text, The Grammar of Ornament provides ornament, which concludes with a chapter on nature. This lavish the artist’s protagonist and in this image, Proposition 1 ornament, and the flatness of the designs lent themselves to a natural extension to her practice, which has included working publication, which broke new ground with its use of the expen- Architecture, she walks away, perhaps querying the authority of reproduction using the new technological advances. In intermittently in the Spode factory in Stoke from 1996 to 2004; a sive and intricate process of chromolithography, contains 100 Jones’s proposition with: “Are you sure?” The female form here “Proposition 4”, Jones stated: “True beauty results from that repose residency at the Wallace Collection (2005-7) inspired sumptuously superb, highly detailed colour plates of ornaments drawn from asserts her refusal to be simply a decorative presence; in the which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect and the decorated classical urns, and her current position as professor of architecture, including textiles, tiles and stained glass. Rejecting process, she escapes the rigid rules of traditional roles and affections are satisfied from the absence of any want.” Abstract fine art at London College of Fashion. Hers is a pragmatic the 19th-century predilection for historic revival and decorative disrupts the visual order. pattern was “seen to lead the eye to move, while giving a satisfy- assertion of the important yet threatened English tradition of arts laden with religious and social connotations, Jones became a For Jones, geometry was fundamental to good ornamental ing structure and therefore being restful to the mind”. decorative arts,2 and of female independence in the art world, progenitor of modernism. design. In “Proposition 8”, he asserted: “All ornament should be A key element for Jones was colour, and a number of the culminating in an elegant yet contemporary baroque. He sought to identify the common principles inherent in based upon a geometrical construction.” Proposition 8 Geometry is principles referred to its application. “Proposition 21” expressed 4 5 Based on perceptual drawing, particularly life-drawing, Hodes’ she points out, she was also taught – by using a black frill as a females are portrayed in silhouette form, draped over, or dancing framing device such as the stage curtain. Here, the female form on, large collaged works and ceramic pots. Dressed in Grecian has been reduced to a stylised skirt, the shape for which has been robes, corsets, hooped skirts or flapper dresses, the images are appropriated from a dressmaker’s paper pattern from the archive placed within and alongside textiles, forming a blaze of colour. at the London College of Fashion. Feet beneath the skirt suggest They constitute both a complex language of patterning and movement and the reading of an image from left to right. The concealment. Patterns and forms are disrupted, the figure conceptual play of word and image is grounded by Hodes’ becomes a mere element of the overall design, and, in addition, meticulous practice, using paper cutting, collage and drawing the patterning conceals her nudity and thus also establishes a from life. screen to protect the artist’s vulnerability. The figures, says Hodes, For Hodes, papercuts are drawings created using a scalpel in “coexist with elements that have over [centuries] been the place of a conventional drawing tool. Her work, using tiny represented and re-represented in the fine and decorative arts: fragments of paper and decorative motifs, explores the diverse drapery, cloth, ornament and pattern. They acknowledge their manner in which the women have been presented in art history; his theory of the harmonious use of primary colours: “In using As a painter, Hodes found the study of printmaking at the origins, but exist, I hope, in the present as past incarnations. They the decorative links to the domestic, and the way in which so the primary colours on moulded surfaces, we should place blue, Slade liberating, working with lithography, which she describes are a celebration of the art histories from which they have come, much of female activity goes unnoticed. Hodes explains her which retires, on the concave surfaces; yellow, which advances, as “the most painterly of the print processes”, under the master whilst existing in a painterly space with my rules.”6 process: “Drawing is the way in which I begin. I make pencil on the convex; and red, the intermediate colour, on the lithographer Stanley Jones of Curwen Press. At each stage proof, By contrast to Grayson Perry, who constructs his own large drawings and take photos from observation, which enable me undersides; separating the colours by white on the vertical it is possible to stand back and consider the next move.