A major exhibition - an unexpected adjunct to the ever more ambitious Threadbone Primavera Festival - has been announced in the form Thrupiece the Craftsman. Generously sponsored by the Threadbone Press and organised by The Thrupiece Organisation in association with Dorset Arts, this major retrospective of the late Professor's work in the field of domestic furnishing features never-before-seen items drawn largely from private collections including a number of objects from the homes of Mrs Amanda J Threadbone and Mrs Edna Whisky-McNightly.
Professor Thrupiece's pioneering work - he is widely regarded by social historians as one of the founding figures of the Dorset Fin-de-Siecle Arts and Crafts Movement - is often overshadowed by his better known achievements in the fields of Culinary Bioethics and Small Electrical Appliance Design. However Exhibition Curator and Director of Research at the Cripplestyle Arts and Crafts Institute - Norman Cottager - believes that the exhibition will lead to a major re-evaluation of the Professor's impact on the aesthetics of hard and soft furnishing design. "He had a way with an occasional table that often surprises", he said as he busily prepared for the Exhibition's opening, "and combined with his understanding of the way a light falls on a distressed relief print, this could be startling". "To call him the William Morris of the tallboy would be something of an exaggeration - though he had his own blue chair period - let's say rather that he was to the papier mache commode what Max Bygraves was to the toothbrush."
The Exhibition opens at the Cripplestyle Arts and Crafts Institute on 14 April and the Exhibition catalogue has (thankfully) not been written by Mr Cottager.
The Thrupiece the Craftsman Exhibition is widely tipped to change our perceptions of the Professor whose aesthetic rethink of domestic furniture has been seriously undervalued hitherto.