Principles and Pilfering: Nottingham Lace Design Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper explores the lace design pedagogy that developed in Nottingham during the first half of the 20th century. It draws on teaching material and student work collected in the Nottingham Trent University Lace Archive and examines three sets of material in particular: portfolios of student drawing; a collection of lace draughts composed for teaching purposes; and student-designed lace samples. These materials are records of a learning process influenced by both a national education system and the local lace industry. While the former was concerned to reproduce a canon of ornamentation obeying certain design principles, the latter needed designers possessing specific technical skills and the ability to copy and adapt existing designs suitable for mass production and consumption. Lace design pedagogy encompassed the “principles’ of design, the “technique” of design, and the “business” of design. In each of these fields, students learnt by copying, so that copying was, to some extent, both the method and the outcome of Nottingham lace design education.

Keywords:

• lace
• Nottingham
• history
• design
• education
• pedagogy

Notes

Notes

1 Brian Smith studied lace design in the 1950s before going on to work as a professional lace designer both within a manufacturing firm and with his own design company. He later became a lecturer in lace design. Although his experience was beyond the period under consideration he was interviewed in order to gain insights into the realities of training and working in lace design, particularly those aspects that were generally left unrecorded, since they were common knowledge at the time.

2 Jarvis was entered in the Art School registers as “Lawrence” but family records show him to have been G. Laurence Jarvis.

3 A watercolor paint made using zinc oxide, rather than lead or titanium, which was widely used in art during this period.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Coles

Rebecca Coles works in the field of arts pedagogy. She has a background in anthropology and sociology and engages in archival, interview-based, and ethnographic research. As well as researching lace pedagogy in the Nottingham Trent University (NTU) Archive, she is currently working with the University of Nottingham and the Tate, conducting qualitative longitudinal research with participants in the gallery’s young people’s program.[email protected]

Amanda Briggs-Goode

Amanda Briggs-Goode is the head of department for fashion, textiles, and knitwear at NTU. As a researcher in the field of textiles she has worked with the lace archive at NTU since 2007 and has established it as a significant lace resource through coorganizing a season of events in Nottingham called “lace:here:now” in 2012/13 and later through coediting a book of the same name with Black Dog Publishing in 2013. She has worked with two PhD students on research projects connected to art practice and supports undergraduate fashion and textile students’ engagement with archives and material culture.[email protected]

Gail Baxter

Gail Baxter is a research fellow in the Lace Archive at NTU. She completed her doctorate through the University of Brighton in 2015. Her expertise covers historic hand- and machine-made laces and contemporary lace practice. In addition she has insight into designing for machine-made lace, having originated the design of a new lace to be manufactured on a historic Leavers lace loom at the International Centre for Lace and Fashion in Calais. She is a PhD supervisor at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. [email protected]