Description

Extended Data

Birth Place

UK

Biography

watercolour painter, interior decorator, textile and fashion designer, ceramicist and teacher, pursued her career in London and Australia. She and other Sydney women artists in the 1940s worked across these disciplines, despite the curtailments to their art which characterised their working lives—and despite the tendency of critics to typecast their work as feminine, decorative and intuitive, hence inferior to the perceived rationality of masculine discourse. At fourteen, Muriel’s drawing skills gained her entry to the Camberwell College of Art in London where she proved a talented student. Her subsequent employment with Green & Abbott, a London-based interior decoration company, included designing textiles and painting Chinoiserie panels for grand houses. During her Sydney years (1939-54) Muriel pursued an active career in an artistic milieu that included many expatriate, immigrant and visiting artists, teachers and designers escaping war-torn London and Europe. Broader perspectives on European modernism, including those brought to Australia by Muriel and her husband Frank Medworth , who had married at the Hammersmith register office on 5 July 1929, contributed to the erosion of a dominant anti-modernist conservatism which promoted academic genres over a modernism then categorised as frivolously 'feminine’ through the focus on colour, fashion and interior design by its major Sydney proponents. In the few located examples of Muriel Medworth’s watercolour paintings such as Ranunculi with Bananas verso (private collection) there is a designer’s restraint of line, colour and interpretative values that distance her work from the merely decorative on the one hand and more evident modernist values on the other. She exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society (which claimed dedication to modernist values) and with the Australian Watercolour Institute. In 1949 she was included in the 'Design and Colour’ exhibition at David Jones Art Gallery mounted by the Double Bay studio of the Society of Arts and Crafts of NSW where she taught drawing. In her teaching, Medworth aimed to 'give a fuller understanding of design through a study of form and composition’, Dora Sweetapple . Muriel Medworth worked with Sweetapple’s interior designer sister, Marion Hall Best . In 1947 she was a contributing designer to Claudio Alcorso’s Modernage Fabric range of textile designs by thirty-two important Australian artists ( see Alice Danciger ). She exhibited paintings and pottery independently and with her husband until his death in 1947. Muriel remained in Sydney until 1954 participating in various exhibitions, then left Australia. Henceforth she divided her time between London and Mallorca, painting land and seascapes. Writers: Giacco, Louise Date written: 1995 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 1903

Summary

Watercolour painter, interior decorator, textile and fashion designer, ceramicist and teacher, pursued her career in London and Australia.

Gender

Female

Died

1964

Age at death

61