Dorich House Museum

Mantelpiece Modernism: The Omega Workshops, Bloomsbury, and Gordine

27 September – 17 November 2018

This exhibition reimagines the mantelpiece and overmantelby exploring the creative boundaries between domestic and studio interiors, and the ways artists curate and engage with their own environments. Here the mantelpiece and its surrounding architecture is explored as a site of public and private curation, andas a platform for modernist practice.

Curators Ben Angwin (Kingston University) and David Herbert (private collector) strike conversations between items produced by The Omega Workshops (1913–1919), a radical interior decorating firm who responded to Continental modernism; artist members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Roger Fry (1866–1934), Duncan Grant (1885–1978), and Vanessa Bell (1879–1961); and with the museum’s extensive collections of modernist sculpture and decorative arts. Historical photographs of Dorich House interiors provide a revealing insight into how émigré sculptor, Dora Gordine (1895–1991) and her husband, Richard Hare (1907–1966), an academic on Russian culture, repeatedly arranged and curated its many mantelpieces and overmantels. These historical photographs guidedthereimagined displays which each explored one of four themes: mantelpieces of the Omega Workshops, the sculptural qualities of Omega wares, Bloomsbury Group mantelpieces, and art and objet d’art produced by artists and makers beyond, though still connected to, Bloomsbury’s core membership.

The exhibition included an important display focussing on a modern British lusterware, a subject previously overlooked in histories of Omega ceramics, and present a range of examples which investigates Omega’s early experiments and influences in the medium, sourcing multiple examples not exhibited before and others not exhibited in over three decades. All exhibits were generously loaned by private and institutional lenders.

A complementary illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibition which included essays exploring the mantelpiece as a site of modernist practice and Omega’s experiments in lustre.

Guided tours of the exhibition took place on 2nd and 17th November at 11.30am.