End to end: Dundee Design Festival's BOOKENDS exhibit

Of all the exhibits at this month’s Dundee Design Festival, one bears particular significance for the city’s history as a hub of industry and women’s emancipation. BOOKENDS, brainchild of festival director Stacey Hunter, sees 20 Scotland-based designers invited to create a pair of bookends in response to Dundee’s Two Intrepid Ladies: A Tour Round the World by DC Thomson’s Female Journalists in 1894.

Edited by Susan Keracher of Dundee’s McManus Galleries, the book features the columns of two Victorian-era DC Thomson employees tasked with reporting on women’s lives across the world on an undertaking dubbed ‘the Ladies’ Tour’. Bessie Maxwell and Marie Imandt visited factories and homes, writing from trains and boats, and their subsequent columns were sent home and published in the Dundee Courier and Weekly News. Their work examines female existence across different cultures, with particular attention given to working conditions, wages and fashion. 

Participating designers have responded to the story in starkly different ways. Some have evoked a particular episode from the women’s travels: a dinner party in Tokyo suburbs or a visit to a sculptor’s workshop in Florence. Some, like Camillo Atlas, have cast one bookend as each journalist, projecting the women’s literary style and personality onto the object. Lauren Morsley’s boldly colourful female figures, made using old copies of The Courier, depict the very core of the story, and call up the spirit of exploration.

Colour is an important part of Maxwell and Imandt’s descriptions, as is often true of travel writing. They couldn’t rely upon comparisons for descriptions in the same way as a contemporary travel writer might whose audience has some knowledge of the world being described. Colour, therefore, takes an even greater share of the descriptive burden, and we see this reflected in many of the designers' responses.

Jennifer Gray’s World at her fingertips sees two hands lightly holding blue orbs (blue vividly inhabits the columns as the colour of the sea, the sky, and the trousers of many men in China). The hands, posed so as to evoke possibility and capability, belong to two of Maxwell and Imandt’s modern day successors writing about travel and culture: Gabriella Bennett and The Skinny’s very own Eilidh Akilade.

The hands represent the opening of possibilities to them, both in terms of the burgeoning travel industry and of alternative visions for female life. They also mimic crystal balls, and ambitions for the future that saturate so much writing around the turn of the century. This idea of posthumously examining historical visions of the future shaped Nicholas Denney Studio’s bookends, ‘Past hopes for the future’, made from concrete and shaped like eroding corner panels of corrugated iron.

“There are parallels between the newspaper, publishing, professional journalism and concrete. They both strike me as heralded innovations from a previous culture. The past hopes for the future,” says Denney. 

Two Intrepid Ladies necessarily deals with stereotypes, received wisdom and perceptions of other nations. Beneath this, however, there runs the theme of how we as Scots conceive of our national character. This is something that resonated with Kate Trouw – her piece Union is in large part a response to Maxwell and Imandt’s experience of a Parsi wedding in modern day Mumbai. They are visibly struck by the dreamlike beauty of the event, and so a local guest reassures them that British weddings are also pretty. Maxwell writes: ‘I smiled, and so did Bessie as we thought of our grim Presbyterian weddings.’ For Trouw, this was a chance to re-examine our national personality.

“It immediately brought to mind the idea of the stereotype of Scottish meanness – which, of course, I would much rather cast as ingenuity and resourcefulness! Starting from first principles and using what you have, or making what you need, resonates with my approach in my jewellery practice. I don’t have any formal training and tend to improvise with what’s at hand – using a lot of objects found on the beach or recycled materials.”

Union’s bookends are substantial in size and abstract in shape, somewhere between coral and agate, made from waste slag glass from Fife and Greek sponge, hardened with resin. Their heft is a pleasing counterpoint to the daintiness and propriety of Victorian female life – their footprint symbolic of the journey’s impact on its readers and protagonists.

“I love to think of the women encountering different aesthetic styles in their travels, and becoming aware that the mores of Scottish culture were not the be all and end all. Did they dress a bit more freely on their return? Were they able to express their personalities more in the decoration of their homes?" Trouw explains, "When I studied architecture, ‘decoration’ was a dirty word and in my jewellery I have had to work hard to allow myself the freedom to engage with things I would have previously considered frivolous and very unserious.”

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BOOKENDS, Dundee Design Festival 2024, 23-29 Sep, Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, Baldovie Rd, Dundee