We’ve been pleased to be able to widen our student placement and volunteering programme recently with support from Art Fund which has generously awarded the Warner Textile Archive a grant for six students to join our team.
Students will spend around 3 months working with us to catalogue, digitise, and learn about the history of Warner & Sons and 1920s design development. We offer in-house training on cataloguing and digitisation, handling of museum collections, and labelling historic textiles.
Having built up a clear picture of the kind of textiles Warner & Sons were manufacturing in the 1920s through cataloguing and research, the student team will then consider what textiles they want to display within the Warner Textile Archive to showcase key design moments of the era, while taking into account conservation requirements for displays and the diverse audiences we welcome at the Warner Textile Archive.
Students will have the opportunity to write exhibition labels and interpretation panels, as well as creating engaging online content to promote their final talk and tour to the public at the end of the project.
The placement students will focus on the textiles manufactured by Warner & Sons in the 1920s. The 1920s was an era of experimentation, with new bold textile designs in vivid colours emerging. At Warner & Sons, Art Deco styles were advertised alongside traditional woven fabrics, making for an eclectic mix of modern and long-established patterns. Showcasing their designs at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, and the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art at Paris in 1925, Warner & Sons were largely regarded as manufacturers of high-quality long-lasting textiles which did not feature novelty patterns, although their more experimental designs were well received and are now design icons of the era.
We are grateful for the support of Art Fund for this project.