A Note on the Ornament Usage of Henry Woodfall (2003)

The following checklist of printers' ornaments was compiled as part of research undertaken to expand the available information on Thomas Gardner (c. 1712Gardner (c. -1765 and to facilitate the identification and differentiation of works printed by him. (And, by identifying more of his printing, obtaining a better idea of the scope of his activities as a printer and publisher.) 1 Gardner was a relatively minor printer-publisher, with a small stock of ornaments, who is known to have printed fewer than two hundred items. However, he was the printer and publisher of most of Eliza Haywood's later, and most highly-regarded, worksincluding The Female Spectator (1744-1746)-and is of considerable interest to Haywood scholars for this reason. 2 I compiled a very crude catalogue of Gardner's ornament stock in 1995, while preparing my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004). I did so by sketching some of the ornaments used by Gardner (and other printers of works by Haywood) into a notebook that I carried from library to library across Europe and America. These sketches were replaced with photocopies, where possible, as it became clear which ornaments had been owned by each printer. While crude, this method was sufficient for the relatively simple task of identifying a few anonymously-printed works as having likely been printed by Gardner, 3 but it was of little use in the more challenging task of differentiating the many editions of each "Book" in The Female Spectator. The present, much more ambitious, ornament catalogue was undertaken with the latter (still incomplete) task in mind.

Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, 2016

Gülru Necipoglu and Alina Payne ed. Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, 2016

The Politics of the Impure, 2010

A shortened version of the second chapter of The Sympathy of Things as it was published in The Politics of the Impure (V2_NAI Publishers, 2010). It relates John Ruskin’s “Wall-Veil” to the better-known “Wall-Dress” (Gewand) of Gottfried Semper by understanding both as occurring at the intersection of matter and force. Matter tends to generate patterns in two ways, either downward or upward in dimensions, respectively surfaces breaking up into lines, or lines meshing together into surfaces. The first relates to tessellated ornament as we encounter it in the work of Owen Jones; the second to the ribboned ornamentation that we find in William Morris’s work.

21-22 March 2014. Co-convened by Richard Checketts and Lara Eggleton, with support from the Henry Moore Foundation and the University of Leeds The descriptive terms ‘decorative’ and ‘ornamental’ are in many ways synonymous with superfluity and excess; they refer to things or modalities that are ‘supplementary’ or ‘marginal’ by their very nature. In the West, such qualitative associations in made objects intersect with long-standing and inter-related philosophical oppositions between ‘form’ and ‘matter’, ‘body’ and ‘surface’, the ‘proper’ and the ‘cosmetic’. Accordingly, this has weighed both on determinations of value in artistic media, and on the inflexions of related histories – particularly histories of ‘non-Western’ art, design and culture, where a wide range of decorative traditions are deemed unworthy of critical attention. Yet such frameworks are no more historically stable than they are culturally universal. To take one very clear and ‘central’ counter-example, decoration in some strands of Renaissance architectural theory (Filarete, Alberti) emerged as a rigorous codification of meaning, as an essentially functional (political) language. In many ways the history of ornament may itself be seen as a process of marginalisation of such ways of thinking, and the separation of ornament from any form of social practice. This two-day conference seeks to explore the various ways in which ornament might be regarded as itself productive of its objects and sites. How might the technologies, techniques, and materials of ornament be related to the conception and transformation of modes of object-making? How might ornament be understood to inform its objects, disrupting the spatial categories of ‘surface’ and ‘structure’, and the temporal models in which ornament ‘follows’ making? What are the relations between ornament and representation, and what is at stake in the conventional oppositions between these categories? What are the roles of ornament in larger dynamics of copying, hybridisation and appropriation between things? In what ways have practices and thinking on ornament staged cultural encounters, and engendered larger epistemological and social models?

THE ART OF ORNAMENT Meanings, Archetypes, Forms and Uses International Conference

Thomas Wilke: The French way - Ornament and interior design in17th and 18th century France