#like. i understand why flatpack ikea furniture is probably going to be plain and boring

[mangled-by-disuse]

for some reason while slightly-delirious-levels-of-tired last night i found myself just. obsessing over how we never ornament shit any more.

like, okay. the thing that sparked this was my partner's flatmate's laptop stand. it is a very basic laptop stand - it's a metal X-frame, and it has little grips on the top ends of the front, so each end is kinda like

(shh i'm still very tired i don't feel like getting my tablet out)

and I was just sitting there like... man. when else in HISTORY, when else in THE ENTIRE ARTISTIC HISTORY OF THE WORLD, would we consistently be overcoming the urge to turn that weird little grip into a carved hand? a bird with open wings? a talon, perchance?

and then looking around the flat like... this is not a nasty flat, it's not badly-decorated or anything, and the same is true of my house, but where are the ornamentations?

By ornamentations, I don't mean "things that look nice", and frankly I actually love a lot of unornamented furniture that's just a Nice Shape or just really well-made. but at some point we also lost the art of - not adding things, exactly, but integrating little decorative flourishes into the things we make and own. carving floral designs into the front of your bookshelves. embroidering your work shirts. painting little designs on your doorframes and your window shutters. carving monstrances and vines and silly little guys into the archways of your grand architecture. putting a cheeky little hand carving on the laptop stand you use for work.

tbh I think there's some answers to be found in this in my boy William Morris' writing from nearly 200 years ago, because so much of the Arts & Crafts movement was based on recognising this loss. How, as industrialisation and mass production reshape design, we move away from artisans proving their chops with little tricks of the trade, because they now have to Add Value in a way that justifies spending ten times more on something that does the same thing. How, with cottage industries hamstrung and the working classes no longer having the long winter nights to whittle spoons and weave cloth, individuals no longer tend to make the things they use. How patents and copyright trickle down to a culture where originality is found only in structural difference, in the shape and the silhouette and the things that can be noticed on first glance.

and the weird thing is, I like unornamented goods. I am a dyed-in-the-wool English Quaker and highly ornamented styles are not at all my natural habitat. the baroque gives me a fucking headache. the first thing I did when I moved into this house was be like "i am getting these overwhelming patterns and squiggly things OUT."

BUT

i also remember as a kid being absolutely enamoured of Robert "Mouseman" Thompson's carpentry. he was a local(-ish, North Yorkshire) carpenter who made furniture and also did a bunch of lecterns and rood screens for churches, stuff like that. And every piece he did, he had a signature that he added:

he was very Arts & Crafts inspired, and you can tell. his furniture on the whole was pretty simple, clean lines and carved channels. but from the 1920s until he died in 1955 he always put a mouse on his work somewhere.

but this is the ornamentation I think I miss in my life. these cheeky little touches. the mouse climbing up the altar rail. the lion feet on chairs and tables. the flowers carved out of a bookcase. braid trimming on upholstery. painted vines climbing a windowframe. stonemasons making shapes in a lintel:

not huge and dramatic and overwhelming. just... artisans, having fun. making things look special, because it's neat and because it's a way to show off and because they can.

idk. I have no conclusion. I just have an image of that laptop stand in lacquered wood with little hands and feet, like a million bookstands and folding stools and the like which were made pre-industrially, and I think I just want to live in a world where that would be. not a statement? not a one-off item?

where everything wasn't so utilitarian and so plain.

i guess what i'm saying is: i wish as a culture we made more stupid little creative choices to make the world we live in fun?