The Stillness of Motion

After 13 weeks of exploration through Giorgio Morandi's artworks and life. I am able to express my design concepts to the 5th floor apartment in the AUT Dadley building. Here is the summary of my creative journey for the colour complex studio project.

Stillness, motion and time is only a relative matter. Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi (July 20, 1890 – June 18, 1964) devoted his whole life to painting. He capaciously demonstrated the “stillness of motion” through his still-life paintings. Morandi used common kitchen objects such as milk jugs and bottles as the subjects for his artworks. He waited for hours or even days for the dust to fall and the light to arrive on a particular angle. Morandi captured motion in his still-life paintings. His paintings are rich but humble at the same time. His subjects are disarmingly mundane and prosaic to most of the viewers at a first glance. His choices of colour palettes are somewhat “muted”. They are nevertheless, earthy, saturated and have a perpetual tension.

From the studying of Morandi’s unique approaches to light shifts, object compositions and colour selections, I tested his theories through model making, watercolour painting, sketching and material selections, which were manifest into textile designs, tile making,

a stairwell installation and ultimately interior designs for the AUT Dadley building apartment. I summarised my project in 5 keywords, which are light, time, stillness, motion and composition. In our busy everyday life which is occupied by digital temptations and social media, no one likes to wait for anything. In the Dadley apartment, the occupants experience their life in a complete opposite way, whether it is a 2 hour breakfast on the balcony while watching the morning shadows and clouds to shift, or an late afternoon snooze in the lounge. Morandi once said in an interview, “Everything in our world is of this world except light. It is the presence of the universe in our daily life”. Time is the best sculptor of life in my opinion.

The theme for the apartment is calming, organic, compositional and layered in Morandi’s muted colour tones. I applied my tile design in the lounge, dining, bathroom floors and walls. One tile design is applied to the kitchen floor in a specific shape inspired by Morandi’s vase. The chosen textile was printed on a 220 gsm cotton canvas fabric and is used for the curtains in the bedroom. The colour palettes are, mustard, seaweed, beige, taupe and vintage rose. Although they are located far apart from each other on the colour wheel, they look visually appealing as a whole.