Australian Arts And Crafts Movement Analysis

Australian Arts and Crafts movement was strongly influenced by the formation of Aesthetic movement and Arts and Crafts exhibition societies and proliferation of design works in the 1880s through the 1890s across Europe and America. The Arts and Crafts movement has emerged to counter the industrial changes followed by the Industrial revolution in Victorian England in the mid-19th century. It was a social movement against the industrial changes that are producing inferior quality and cheap monotonous products manufactured in the factories. As a consequence, it recalled the traditional handicrafts by the skillful craftsman using natural forms, functional, and stylized simple lines . Also it referenced to the medieval Gothic styles and it is characterized by its flatness and simplified natural motifs that are showing the influence of Japanese Art.

Constance Roth was a British born female artist who first arrived in Australia in 1881. She is unpopular but she played a significant role in promoting the British Arts and Crafts movement in Australia. This paper will discuss how an Australian Arts and Crafts movement combined with a nationalist aesthetic sensibility in Constance Roth’s works. We can see her wonderful efforts in bringing decorative art in domestic spheres of high art in the public sphere. It will particularly focus on ‘the apples’ and the door panel that reveal the impact of Japanese art in the depictions of simple lines, flatness and composition. It will also engage with the prevailed social norms of the late 19th century to early 20th centuries that bound women to the domestic