Decorative Arts in Canada
Editorial by John Fleming
THIS ISSUE OF ORNAMENTUM follows the technique of mosaic construction through the material history of the decorative arts in the production of objects. The picture it provides leads in many directions into the imaginative and creative things we make, collect, preserve, discard, and destroy. Each of these objects opens upon multiple perspectives …
ORNAMENTUM celebrates 10 years of publication in 2015 as it continues to record our delight in the pursuit and pleasure of discovering and promoting interest in the decorative arts in Canada. This retrospective adventure maintains our ongoing off-angle approach to the many aspects of the decorative arts and the images they create of our historical …
Editorial by John Fleming
In this issue we touch upon a few of the physical avatars of alcohol and the decorative persuasions of advertising and practice in promoting its use in social contexts. As current linguistic clichés would have it, “what goes around, comes around,” in this instance, the revival of the cocktail culture of the art deco period between …
Editorial by John Fleming
Until the mid-19th century, architecture in the formal European tradition, as opposed to the vernacular, generally followed classical concepts of structure and style. Where structure was function realized, style was made manifest through the non-functional, usually aesthetic and decorative characteristics that distinguished period, culture, and taste. Thus the five classical orders of Greek and Roman antiquity …
Editorial by John Fleming
The “invention of the wheel, which doesn’t look at all like a leg” (Guillaume Apollinaire), sums up in a few words what is undoubtedly one of humanity’s most useful scientific concepts. Continuous rotary motion through the simplicity and formal elegance of the circle harnesses human energy and natural forces such as wind and water to devices …
Editorial by John Fleming and Marian Bradshaw
In this issue we choose among a multiplicity of examples in which the graphic and the decorative arts intersect, overlap and combine in surprising ways. The graphic arts are centred upon writing and drawing, most commonly in the sense of linguistic sign systems, ranging from the hieroglyphics of early Egypt through calligraphic Chinese …