Morton’s mission

Alastair Morton should be regarded as a pivotal figure in British crafts, says Lesley Jackson

Alastair Morton (1910-63) represented the third generation in a remarkable textile dynasty that began with his grandfather, Alexander Morton, founder of the renowned Arts and Crafts firm of Alexander Morton & Company, followed by his father, Sir James Morton, a pioneer of textile dyes who rebranded the company as Morton Sundour Fabrics. When Alastair joined the family firm in 1931 at 21, he was put in charge of Edinburgh Weavers, a specialist branch producing high-quality furnishing fabrics, conceived as the belles lettres of the Morton textile empire. It had been based in Edinburgh – and is thus often confused today with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company (still active as Dovecot Studios) – but by 1931, Edinburgh Weavers was operating from Morton Sundour Fabrics’s main headquarters, and there it remained, with its anomalous name, jewel in the crown and at times thorn in the flesh of its more mainstream parent company. Bought out by Courtaulds in 1963, the operation finally succumbed in 1970.

Difficult though circumstances were during the early 30s, with the whole country deep in recession, Alastair Morton embraced Edinburgh Weavers as a vehicle for his own creativity. Spearheading the company for the next three decades, until his untimely death in 1963, Morton not only flowered as a designer himself, excelling in both prints and weaves, but harnessed the company as a platform for numerous artists and designers, over 150 in all.

In 1937, the year Edinburgh Weavers launched its first major collection of artists’ textiles, the Constructivist Fabrics, featuring designs by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, it was praised by Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘laboratory for the best modern textile art’ (_An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England_, 1937). Other contributors over the years included Marion Dorn, Ashley Havinden, Cecil Collins, Geoffrey Clarke, Elisabeth Frink and Marino Marini. It’s an extraordinary list, but there are many lesser-known figures too, as Morton was very independent-minded and had an eye for emergent talent. Lucienne Day, Terence Conran and David Gentleman were all given early breaks by Edinburgh Weavers.

Today Morton may seem a shadowy figure, but for contemporary practitioners – artists, makers, designers and art directors alike – he should provide an inspiring role model. Morton was a visionary and an idealist, but also practical and down-to-earth: an industrial designer who appreciated the visceral qualities of craft; an artist-designer who, in a tangible way, pierced the artificial barriers between so-called fine and applied art. ‘Beauty, the enjoyment of it and the expression of it, is as much part of man’s nature as biological fitness or technical efficiency,’ he wrote in The Art of Weaving (1949). ‘And perhaps man at his best, as well as art at its best, is when contemplation and action, enjoyment and use, beauty and technical soundness, are combined, when they are in harmony and not in conflict.’

Through his diverse activities as a painter, weaver, textile designer and artistic patron, Morton stimulated cross-fertilisation between art, craft and manufacturing, not in a tokenistic way but through direct intervention and as a catalyst. ‘To be an artist is to be aware of beauty and to find means of expressing that awareness,’ he argued. ‘It does not matter if the means used to express it are paint and canvas, or stone, or pottery, or dye stuffs and yarns in weaving, or music or words. Whatever way we choose to make real our awareness of beauty, that is art.’ For him, painting and designing were parallel activities, so his paintings contain allusions to textiles – lines as threads, for example – while his textiles evoke the colours and textures of oil paintings and watercolours, through subtly chosen dyes, weave structures and yarns.

Morton’s post-war textiles were greatly enhanced by his wartime apprenticeship with the legendary hand-weaver, Ethel Mairet, in 1944. After this, as he explained in a letter to Ben Nicholson, he felt ‘ready to start constructing some good fabrics from the roots up’. So smitten was he by hand-weaving that he set up a workshop at his home in the Lake District. Here he experimented with unusual yarns, such as a lustrous plant fibre called ramie, and natural Herdwick wool (from hardy Lakeland sheep), developing prototypes for Edinburgh Weavers as well as producing hand-woven furnishing fabrics, rugs and stoles. In The Art of Weaving, he speaks lyrically about the creativity unleashed by hand-weaving: ‘Designing on a hand loom, changing the yarn and the weave and the colour as the cloth grows in front of you is like composing at the piano.’ Peter Collingwood, who later achieved international fame as an artist-weaver, began his career in Morton’s Croft Foot workshop near Hawkshead in 1951, and remained a lifelong fan. ‘Alastair seemed to have the perfect balance between technical knowledge and aesthetic sensibility,’ he recalled. ‘His critical eye, so used to looking at and evaluating textiles, was something to envy.’