Freya Gowrley – författare

A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to todayWhile the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.

Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from 1750-1840, this book demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how the function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at a time when it took on unprecedented social and emotional significance.Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late 18th- and early 19th-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2023Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.