You can trace William Morris's designs for wallpaper from about 1850 until 1890. His concern for bringing back the romantic craft element of design manifests itself often in floral and natural elements. Yet the constraints of manufacture and usability of wallpaper produced very few variations on the general arrangements of elements.
Basically, wallpaper is block printed and so is effectively a tiled pattern.
Here, in the first two examples I have used the same tile (with 8 flower heads) and printed it is two ways. In the first, the tiles are arranged as the bricks in a wall. In the second, they are simply piled on top of each other. Morris was more elaborate than this, but not very much.
More on Morris's other tilings in a later post. Meanwhile, here are some further examples where the tile has been made from photographs of a clematis plant on the kitchen wall and a leaf from a beech tree in the woods - so combining Photography, Geometry and Abstraction.
