Inside Morris & Co. X The Huntington with a Morris & Co. Designer
Jess Clayworth, Lead Designer at Morris & Co., shares her experience working on the Morris & Co. X The Huntington collection.
What’s it like to finish a drawing by William Morris? Jess Clayworth, Lead Designer at Morris & Co., shares the artistic processes, challenges, and pressures the team had putting together Morris & Co. X The Huntington collection.
How do you know when a work of art is finished? It’s a question that Jess Clayworth, our Lead Designer at Morris & Co. was faced with, when she went to visit the archives of the original unfinished works by Morris & Co. at The Huntington Library, a museum and research institution in California. Here, she looked at their original sketches, notations, drawings and plans to create Morris & Co.’s latest collection: Morris & Co. X The Huntington.
We caught up with Jess, where she shares what it was like putting this collection together, and all the questions and challenges that came up as she and the team moved through the creative process:
"I hadn’t seen the collections at The Huntington before. When we went over with fresh eyes, spending days pouring over the documents, it was exhilarating.
It was a genuine thrill, something I’ll never forget. I came back home filled with excitement, but also nerves. The question came up: Can I do this justice? You want to make Morris & Co. fans proud, William Morris proud, and, of course, yourself. As a design team, we asked ourselves constantly how best to preserve the works, refine them, finish them, and still make them relevant today.
What helped was knowing we weren’t alone. We had the archive team in Chiswick who helped guide us through the extensive record of every wallpaper sample Morris & Co. has ever released, as well as the Huntington Library’s own archive team on hand to help.
The graphite drawing of Chamomile (now a design in the series) felt like the natural starting point. A simple embroidery sketch, with visible tweaks most likely made by Morris. It reminded me of Marigold, a design we know so well at Morris & Co. To see the annotations, notes from Dearle or Morris, it was almost like being given an instruction.
From there, I could begin to imagine the path ahead, what could we, as designers today, do to finish these unfinished treasures?
It never felt like stepping into the shoes of Morris or Dearle. It was more as though we were working alongside them, across generations. At every turn, the documents presented both challenges and opportunities. First came the daunting task of selection: how do you distil all this incredible work and choose which ones to work with? Then came the designs that continued to reveal new details each time we looked at them, appearing as fabrics, or wallpapers, perfect for their new purpose.
One of the biggest challenges was: How do you have a dialogue with designers, part of the same company, when you have over a hundred years in between you? Is it possible to honour, or even know, their intentions of the work, let alone complete it? Those were some of the questions that stretched me most as an artist.
Above all, this process has sharpened my focus on refinement. It’s easy to look at something and see only its beauty. What’s harder is to sit with it longer, to recognise when something isn’t working. That’s the lesson of this collection: to look deeper, to look again, and to keep looking until the design reveals itself fully."
