Herzog August Library, Wolfenbuttel, Germany

Fashion & Folly, or Strawberry Hill Extra-Illustrated: A practice-led investigation of extra-illustration as a methodology for the presentation of an exhibition proposal

This paper offers a practical and processual view of extra-illustration as the format for both devising and communicating a proposal for a site-responsive exhibition at Strawberry Hill House. This exhibition, entitled Fashion & Folly: Strawberry Hill Extra-Illustrated, is a thematic essay on fashion graphic satire from the 18th century through the present day comprised of satirical prints and other artworks displayed in dialogue with extant garments and in response to the histories and biographies of Horace Walpole and his villa. In devising this independent curatorial project (the practical component of my PhD to be submitted in late 2018) as both site-specific and site-responsive, I have investigated Horace Walpole’s practice of collecting and display towards the reframing of some of his practices as precursors to my own exhibition-making practices and those of other curators and exhibition-makers of the past century.

I will discuss these parallels and focus on extra-illustration as both a model of practice and a metaphor for contemporary curating; tracing how the situating of my own creative methodologies has been informed and inspired by Horace Walpole’s own spectrum of practice as it relates to collecting, display, and design activities at Strawberry Hill. The paper will also discuss how I have employed techniques similar and adjacent to extra-illustration in my prior professional and creative works – prior to cultivating an awareness of historical practices of the customisation and alteration of printed works.

 Drawing on the work of Ruth Mack, Lucy Peltz and others, I revisit Walpole’s practice of extra-illustration as a template and a point of departure for my own work. My engagement with the extra-illustrated copies of The Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill near Twickenham in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale (by Walpole and others) have led me (very recently in fact) to produce a 21st century version of the Description as the practical submission to my dissertation, and as the future proposal document of Fashion & Folly to the Strawberry Hill Preservation Trust. This volume, beyond its practical function as a means of conveying the exhibition’s curatorial intent and content, will be a book-object that is in itself a dialogue with Walpole and extra-illustration as a means of documenting and describing physical space and a proposed journey through it.

 This paper frames extra-illustration as a methodological talisman and a metaphor for exhibition-making, showing how Walpole’s Extra-Illustrated Description (like my own to come) is a document that archives creative processes and their outcomes simultaneously.