IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B

Abstract

Morrísland is a metaphorical atlas that plots my findings from my ongoing research into William Morris and Iceland. It is based on a reworking of Abraham Ortelius’s 1590 map of Iceland. Morrísland is a conceptual reading and visualisation of William Morris’s experiences of and relationship to Iceland – it’s culture, history, landscape and people. As with Ortelius’s map or indeed any map, Morrísland is a topographic interpretation based on the author’s own socio-cultural agendas and biases (Harley & Woodward 1987).

Morris first visited Iceland in 1871, he perceived it as a pristine wilderness (Morris 1871). Then as now, Iceland’s distinctive identity and heritage is rooted in its landscape, climate and medieval origins (Page & Plant 1970).

Using regions and locations within Morrísland, such as The Peninsular of Eschewal & Escape and The Bay of Cuckolds, I will outline why Morris visited Iceland. Then traversing areas such as The Jökul of Optimism and The Isthmus of Influence, I will describe how Morris’s Icelandic experiences led to the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and the Socialist League. I will also briefly outline how my Postmodern appropriation, employing forms of visual rhetoric (Hill & Helmers 2004) enabled the articulation of a mesh of tangible and intangible phenomena. I will discuss how this approach facilitated the collection, plotting and interpretation of an eclectic ambit of socio-cultural “data”. Raising questions about what constitutes the notion of data? What determines the type of data collected? How it may be interpreted and curated. * Ísland – Icelandic for Iceland. Harley, J. & Woodward, D. (1987) The History of Cartography. Chicago University Press. Hill, C. & Helmers, M. (2004) Defining Visual Rhetorics. Lawrence Erlbaum. Morris, W. (1871) William Morris Icelandic Journals. Mare’s Nest, 1996. Page, J. & Plant, R. (1970) The Immigrant Song, Led Zeppelin III. Atlantic Records.