David Mabb

David Mabb’s work uses appropriated images, fabric, wallpaper, photographs or paintings as his starting point. Fabrics have been used for their cultural and political signification. He uses commercially reproduced copies of William Morris original textiles and wallpaper and over paints sections of them, selecting and (re)presenting them like flowers laid out on a collector’s/botanist’s specimen tray. These works allude to both the utopian projects of Modernism and William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement. Mabb’s video work, such as ‘A Closer look at the life and work of William Morris’ parodies the documentary, in particular, the use of the rostrum camera image of the ‘artwork’ and the close-up.