Talking about Wallpaper

Conducting the interviews for the Sonic Wallpaper project was a rich and thought-provoking process. I am grateful to everyone who participated and shared their responses to the wallpapers I'd short-listed from the MoDA collection


Annie, Colleen and Felicity discussing wallpaper at MoDA; image © Richard Lumb and used with the permission of MoDA

I learnt through the interviews that when we discuss wallpaper in terms of atmospheres and memories - and not purely in terms of designs, fashion and history - powerful narratives emerge. The agency, imagination and creativity of the home-maker become apparent when he/she is presented with wallpapers and combines this with their experiences of homes and rooms and life lived therein. Through a process of considering and responding to wallpapers, a design which at first glance appeared bland or unassuming became a canvas on which to project the memories of a flat once lived in; a forest-like pattern inspired fantasies involving woodland and the quiet stillness of a chilly Autumn morning; a psychedelic print evoked the vision of a party where everyone is a bit shallow and stylishly posed; and bold, blousy flowers inspired a discussion on showing off, intimidation and social-climbing.


Wallpapers, shortlisted for Sonic Wallpaper interviews. Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

As we talked, the pile of wallpapers became a repository of domestic dreaming, memories, wishes, observations, and polemic. Mundane memories were also evoked; the recollection of an irritating paper which wouldn't hold the wallpaper paste properly surfaced, along with another person's nightmarish memory of trying to scrape Artex off a ceiling.


Joceline considering wallpaper at MoDA; image © Richard Lumb and used with the permission of MoDA

Exploring MoDA's wallpapers also revealed desires for certain kinds of domestic spaces. Yearnings were exposed for spaces such as a garden room where there are plants and light to sit amongst; a room specifically allocated for the creation of chutneys and preserves; and a writing attic, where inkwells, pens and crisp cartridge paper a stacked inside a bureau. These longings were detailed, rich, complex and imaginative, connecting a sense of self with the organisation of domestic space.

I was amazed by how exploring the wallpapers at MoDA through the Sonic Wallpaper interview process frequently transgressed from a discussion re: wallpaper into questions concerning lifestyles and domestic activities.


Tom consulting the wallpapers. Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

The next phase of the Sonic Wallpaper project will involve developing these narratives through sound, to create Sonic Wallpaper. Interviews will be edited and developed into sound pieces so that the thoughts and spaces imagined by interviewees can be conveyed to new audiences, and used to add depth and fresh perspectives to a touring exhibition of MoDA's wallpapers. I am very excited about this phase of the project and about translating the rituals of home-decorating into audible content and wallpaper you can listen to!

Sound can describe memories, eras, times and spaces in ways that pictures and images can't. While you can look at a floorplan or indeed a sheet of wallpaper and "visualise" how a space will appear, it is only when you hear a recording of walking through the space papered with it that you might begin to understand how air and molecules resonate within that space, or even how long the experience of walking through it might take.

Memories can be contained in the passing minutes and hours that a sound-recording captures. You can look at something in the blink of an eye but the blink of an ear is slower and we do not hear in snapshots. Soundwaves move from wall to wall inside our living rooms, capturing the size and depth of those spaces, the quantity and nature of the furnishings within and so on. So my challenge now is to conjure - in sound - the rooms, spaces and atmospheres which my interviewees have described, through a series of field-recording exercises, so that their descriptions relate to a Sonic Wallpaper or a Sonic sense of space, and not merely to wallpaper as a visually-designed aspect of home-decorating.

Some people describe imaginative listening as a process of "auralisation," an aural equivalent to "visualisation," whereby we imagine places acoustically, rather than picturing them. I like that idea. I look forward to listening to and recording such things as the drips of moisture falling inside a conservatory; the round, glassy sounds of stacking jars against one another on a sturdy wooden shelf; and the delicate, wet scratchings of a pen against paper in a tiny attic. There will be other sounds, other spaces to "auralise" and they will be revealed in little glimpses here, throughout coming weeks.

The next phase of the project will involve my putting all our conversations onto my iPod, and walking around for days at a time listening over and over to the interviews. I shall reach for the ear's imagination, and try to imagine the soundscapes attending my interviewees' fancies and discussions regarding domestic space. The wallpapers which end up in the final MoDA collection will be selected according to the Sonic Wallpapers which they have inspired, and the experience we create for exhibition-goers will be led by this, rather than by a desire to showcase the most arresting visual designs.

That was the most interesting revelation from the Sonic Wallpaper interviews; I learnt that the most arresting visual designs are perhaps not always the most interesting from the perspective of how we imagine and consider and remember and create our domestic spaces. It is the creativity of the home-maker and the imagination of the resident in domestic space which I hope to reflect in my Sonic Wallpaper designs, because those rich things are what you find when you scratch the surface of wallpaper and search for what is underneath, and they - for me - are best described in sound.


Tom and Anthony with their favourite wallpaper designs, respectively to decorate The Study, and The Beatnik Bedroom. Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

A wallpaper memory

Do you have a memory of a specific, childhood wallpaper?

I have been thinking about childhood memories of wallpaper ever since I started working on this project at MoDA.

My most detailed memory concerns a design my Mother chose for our bathroom when we got it redone.

This happened just before or after my Mum was expecting my youngest brother. Anticipating what it would be like to have four small children under the age of nine, my parents decided we would need a much bigger bath for bath times, and so we got a massive corner bath into which we would all fit. From the 'mushroom' colour of this key piece, my Mum extrapolated a vision for the rest of the décor. She was focused and excited about her plans for the room in a way that was infectious; I too happily anticipated how the room would turn out; and I too felt proud of the sophisticated new bathroom we were to enjoy. We were to have tiles in a beige/white combination up to the dado rail height, and upwards of this, a vinyl wallpaper featuring flocks of grey/blue birds flying over pastel beige/peach/cream sunsets would adorn the walls.

This image (licensed under Wiki Commons license) shows the division of the wall into above and below dado rail height; you just have to imagine the bottom half being covered in fadey, wishy-washy white and beige tiles, and the top half covered in seagull sunsets.



Looking back with adult eyes, the wallpaper I recall had a decidedly 1980s flavour; it was sheeny, with a not entirely smooth surface; and the flocks of seagulls in their pastel sunset were slightly embossed and a bit on the silver side of grey/blue. The shades of beige/peach/cream were restrained for a 1980s palette, but may seem garish to modern eyes.

Still, I feel my Mum had a vision for how the bathroom would feel once embellished with her selection of tiles and paper, and I understood - even though I was only about eight years old - that she was doing something significant in designing our living space and giving the bathroom a deliberate aesthetic. I am sure I would not have phrased it like that at the time, but I knew she wanted to make the bathroom into a calm, relaxing, neutral place.

However as I am learning, there is nothing neutral about the potent desires and impulses which lie behind wallpaper - and other home-decorating - choices. Rather wallpaper is connected with deep feelings concerning social standing; public image; one's tastefulness (or lack thereof); and the emotional requirements of domestic space and the effect of design thereon.

My Mother's discussions with me about the decoration of the bathroom impacted on my eight year old imagination to the extent that when we moved on from that house into another house, I felt deeply sad for the loss of that room, in particular. I was regretful that we would no longer be able to enjoy the balmy, pastel-y, 1980s vision for bathing restfulness that my Mum had so conscientiously established, and anxious that the new residents of our house might not appreciate the lovely job she had done with the colours.

What are your wallpaper memories?

on the Conservation of wallpapers

The conservation of vintage wallpapers lies rather outside my own areas of expertise, but I am very interested in maintenance tasks and also in the secret life of material things, therefore I learn from - and enjoy - observing how the important objects and materials at MoDA are maintained and conserved by the Staff there.

In selecting wallpapers to show to the public in the Sonic Wallpaper exhibition, it is essential that what we choose can withstand the pressures of being framed, travelled around, and exposed to light. Emma Shaw discussed with me last week how inherently ephemeral and fragile wallpaper is, and explained a bit about how samples must be prepared for display.

Some sections of wallpaper in the MoDA collection are still in rolls and need to be flattened. These include a design which features stone arches in a kind of faux architecture pattern, and a flocked paper.


Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

The flocking process is apparently very involved, and results in many delicate fibres poking directly upwards from the paper. These fibres can be easily crushed or damaged, so it is important that if weights are applied to the surface, that this is done carefully and that something is done to protect the flocking.


Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

To flatten the flocked wallpaper I am hoping to include in the Sonic Wallpaper project, Emma Shaw - who is the Preventative Conservation Officer at MoDA - laid 2 heavy sheets of blotting paper on top of it, and then a thinnish sheet of glass on top of them. The resulting "sandwich" now sits on a worktable in the conservation room, where Emma will periodically check up on it, until it is flat.


Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

The other design will be flattened by applying through fine misting using a dahlia spray. The moisture will cause the fibres in the paper to relax, so that it will flatten out easily.


Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

What I especially liked about watching Emma fix up the papers - and listening to her speak about the process - was the sense of methodical and necessary labour. These kinds of tasks are absolutely essential for the preservation of anything old or delicate, and experts all over the country right now are performing routine tasks of maintenance and conservation on things so that we may continue to enjoy and see them long into the future.

The sounds in the recording I have published here are of myself and Emma discussing the conservation work; of the hum of the air-conditioning in the conservation room; and of the materials involved in preserving the wallpaper. I like the recording for its quiet sense of industry, and for the way it evidences materials and tools and the preservation of the past.

Process

One of the things I find essential to developing an idea, is physically coming into contact with things and materials. Objects are something that we think with, and it is my experience as an artist that actually handling, hearing and smelling them in 3-D reality is as central to the imaginative process as seeing them (in spite of Art History's obsession with the visual). Luckily for the sake of this project, handling the objects and responding to them is allowed, although gloves must be worn in the study room for conservation purposes.

I have now spent two happy sessions at MoDA shortlisting from their enormous collection of wallpapers to find samples suitable for the Sonic Wallpaper project. This began as a rather intellectual exercise, with me thinking that we should choose wallpapers in different categories - abstract, figurative, floral etc. - but discussing the papers with Maggie and Emma during my visit last week, and also handling a whole new batch of different samples, has shifted the direction just slightly. Rather than presenting interviewees of the Sonic Wallpaper project with a mix of categorised samples, I have devised a series for the interviews which will hopefully take visitors on a journey from fairly recognisable and familiar papers, through to the examples of wallpaper in the MoDA collection which are going to be more fantastical to contemporary eyes and home-making sensibilities.

During my encounter with the MoDA collection last week, I found that papers with recognisable designs on them - papers which I could easily associate with relatives' homes and childhood memories - immediately opened up a remembering/imagining state of mind, whereas papers with extremely fantastical or brightly-coloured imagery on them inspired more fanciful and less domestic thinking processes. I am beginning to find it more and more helpful to relate the stages of this project to the stages of actually decorating a room; to immerse myself in all the contexts which surround the relatively everyday ritual of decorating a room.

In my imagination, this project is like a room, and we are picking the right papers for it, based on the responses I am imagining they may evoke; it's not so different at all from decorating a bedroom or a kitchen; except that the 'room' in question is not a space made for sleeping and cooking in, but an imaginative dimension, in which the wallpaper used must be made accessible and inspiring to the people who are going to consider and look at it.

Emma Shaw - who is the Preventive Conservation Officer at MoDA - also made a helpful suggestion during my visit regarding how the wallpaper samples will eventually be displayed. Up until my visit last week, I had been thinking about the project purely in terms of SOUND, and in terms of voices and field-recordings leading viewers and listeners through an imaginative contemplation of wallpaper. However after talking to Emma about the final exhibition that this project will become, I realise that even for this stage of the project, wallpaper samples should be organised as a journey through ideas rather than in themed groups. This is the kind of discovery that you can only make by physically walking through an idea; in this case, through taking sample after sample out of box after box and looking at each one critically, with the hands, eyes and imagination, and wondering where it fits, what it links to, how it will make people feel, what it means and how - in its physical state - it suggests or describes an environment with attendant sounds.

Obviously I can show you this image of wallpaper - one of the many samples which I consulted last week at MoDA as part of this project - but I will have to work a little harder and grapple with language and memory to try and convey the impact that encountering it as an object had on me and therefore how I imagine it will - as an object - give ideas and associations to the people who have agreed to be interviewed as part of this process:

Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

There are many aged fragments of paper like this one at MoDA, bearing familiar rose and trellis patterns, fragile corners and edges darkened by the passage of time. Some of them seem very small, offering just the merest glimpse into the thoughts somebody once had about a room they were decorating. The ephemeral nature of wallpaper means that older fragments feel particularly fragile, as though one is holding just a tiny remnant left over from somebody's domestic space.

In terms of the sounds this fragment makes me imagine, I found the act of sifting through papers and looking at them at MoDA to be reminiscent of the quiet, focussed discussions we have in rooms together, standing and assessing and imagining what a space might look like after we have transformed it. These particular papers with their roses and warm, pinkish tones are full of memories of girlishness and a kind of self-conscious aspiration to femininity. The associated sounds I imagine while looking at it are very soft and delicate; a pink powder puff I once had in a tin with a rose pattern on the top; the gentle "shhh" as lining-paper is smoothed into a clothes drawer; the sound of heavy drapes being closed across a window at night; the muffled space inside a duvet; the distinctive sound of pearls being replaced or removed from a jewellery box. These for me are very quiet papers connected to the entire idea of The Boudoir, or perhaps - even more personally - to my own former, self-conscious, suburban, teenage-girlhood appropriation of that idea.

Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

I also found myself looking at several designs which were the same pattern, but which utilised different colour schemes. This made me think about colour discussions and how emotional our responses to different colours tend to be, especially regarding how they change the atmosphere in a room.

Several selections where the pattern is the same, but where the design comes in a whole range of different colours have therefore been incorporated into the Sonic Wallpapers shortlist. I am wondering how interviewees will respond to the effects of colour changes on designs like this...

Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford



Wallpaper © Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University – photographed by Felicity Ford

All of the handling of wallpaper and the consideration of the viewers' experience which I am shaping here for the interview days towards the end of the month put me slightly uncomfortably in touch with the fear that I might be choosing very poorly from the collection, or displaying a horrendous ignorance about the history of wallpapers in my selections, but these emotions are entirely appropriate to the process of choosing wallpaper itself, and are in a sense native to the entire context of the wallpapering of space. As Christine Woods writes in her excellent introduction to "Walls are talking, Wallpaper, Art and Culture";

Depending on the rules of the time, the hanging of particular styles of pattern displayed either the consumer's awareness of current fashionable taste or their innate vulgarity. Choosing wallpaper has always been a tricky business, and our feelings towards it have always been ambivalent. From small beginnings as a decorative novelty for the middle and upper classes, through its controversial passage as a carrier of noxious vapours and instigator of mad episodes, wallpaper has become both the silent witness of and active participant in Western culture, acting as an important social and cultural signifier. In regarding paper as nothing more than 'white noise' we allow ourselves to ignore rather than address its power.

I love that in that quote, Woods labels precisely the fears surrounding, and also the ubiquity of, wallpaper in our culture. I obviously also enjoy her sonic simile, in which Wallpaper has historically been considered to be a kind of 'white noise', being both present and also disregarded or easy to filter out.

As the process of exploring wallpaper in my own distinctive, domestic soundscape fashion develops, I am excited to see what happens when we bring that 'white noise' to the fore via the production of clear, distinct sound-works, and in continuing to allow these wonderful materials at MoDA to lead the way.