In 2010 the V&A acquired a unique print from a series of 100 made by British artist David Mabb as a fundraising exercise for the journal Historical Materialism. (see E.12-2011) This poster reproduces one of the other prints from the series and it was made to promote ‘Weighs Like a Nightmare’, the Historical Materialism 2012 conference held at SOAS, London, 8-11 November.

For some years now, David Mabb has been engaged in a kind of posthumous collaboration with William Morris, using Morris fabrics and wallpapers as sources of inspiration, and also using them as grounds for paintings or incorporating them into printed works, as here. Mabb’s interest in Morris focuses not only on the design of his patterns but also the inherent contradictions between Morris’s political beliefs – he was a campaigning Socialist - and his practice as a designer and business-man – he made his living creating luxury goods that were affordable only by the upper middle-classes. This poster, and the related prints, melds one of Morris’s wallpaper patterns – here, Honeysuckle, with a geometric motif taken from a Russian Constructivist pattern design. Mabb thus unites and contrasts the craft aesthetic of Morris with the machine aesthetic of Constructivism.