Gothic Screen

This wallpaper was produced for manufacturer Cole & Son Ltd. in about 1955. This gothic-style lattice-work pattern uses bright colours that were popular with British consumers in the 1950s. The wallpaper was screen –printed and was fairly expensive. It would have been particularly popular with design-conscious consumers at this time. Listen to the audio created for the Sonic Wallpaper Project commissioned by MoDA and realised by Dr Felicity Ford https://soundcloud.com/modamuseum/02-badda-2298 To create this piece, willing interviewees were asked to respond to wallpaper in the MoDA collection and asked to share their responses. Felicity then went on to create field-recordings based on what people said about the wallpaper design. She then layered these recordings with the interview material relating to this design, expanding the fantasies of home decorating using the descriptive powers of sound! People responded to this wallpaper (accession no. BADDA 2298) with fantasies involving old churches designed by Pugin, holidays in Tunisia, indoor swimming pools, and birds. Some of the recordings created to contextualise these imaginative ideas could not have been collected without the help of the St. James & St. William of York Church in Reading (which was designed by Pugin).