Kaleidoscope-o-rama – MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission2023

Through the Kaleidoscope-o-rama Commission, presented as part of NGV Triennial 2023, Bethan Laura Wood explores the gendered history of acquiring and sharing knowledge through the lens of a kaleidoscope in this multi-piece installation. The installation includes a five-tiered, hexagon-shaped bookcase, developed in collaboration with the Italian manufacturer Alpi, and a hand-tufted hexagonal wool carpet, made by long-time collaborator CC.

In Wood’s installation, the 18th & 19th century gallery becomes a contemporary bluestocking parlour for shared conversation and contemplation. Drawing on the colours of the regency period she has created her own books of ‘exotic’ woodgrain, whose paired veneer pages are cut and composed, like the early paper collages or patchworks associated as a ‘fitting’ past time for women, into the larger scale furnishing of the room.

“Bluestockings” were a social and literary network of women intellectuals in London. At a time when women had little financial independence or access to higher education, bluestockings harnessed the power they did have, over their homes, social settings, and friendships, to transform both their tangible and intangible worlds – the parlour and the imagination – into spaces of discovery.

When it was invented in 1816, the eyepiece of a kaleidoscope transported its user into a world of unimaginable variations of colours and patterns. For bluestockings, it was conversation, reading and letters – activities that were domestic and ephemeral – that were their eyepiece to the wider world. Like the moving mirrors of a kaleidoscope, the true impact, shape and form of Bluestockings’ knowledge-making is impossible to pin down. Like many women throughout history, they left little tangible behind, and so Wood’s interpretation and rendering of their story is a new, shifting mosaic, pieced together to create invented images and possibilities.

Wood’s furniture and textiles speak to a history that is layered and complex, rather than chronological. The furniture’s contemporary forms recontextualize the works from the NGV Collection they sit alongside. Catching the colours, patterns and textures of a moment in time and refracting them through a new lens, Wood’s works are themselves kaleidoscope.

To further enhance the atmosphere of Woods Blue stocking Parlour, a digital wallpaper has been designed to morph and rotate evoking the movement of the bookcases when in use and that of the Kaleidoscope, a tool for seeing patented in 1817 by Sir David Brewster of which Bethan has taken reference.

The Kaleidoscope can itself be viewed in multiple ways, one as a way to change our pre-set vision. Small elements that may be dismissed in the day-to-day, or when viewed alone, if given a platform and allowed to multiply can create a whole new world, landscape in which to dream or see the world a fresh.

The other as a warning, like with the internet that first seemed a landscape of endless possibilities for connection and expanding knowledge. Unchecked, it can become an echo chamber reflecting back only one small fragment of the world around you, making you blind to see this in context, or that their many ways of seeing.

Images by Kate Shanasy, Mark Cocksedge.

Videos courtesy of the NGV and MECCA.