Discover a new commission inspired by the designs of May Morris and Mary Watts by Dr Louise Atkinson.
Atkinson's work, titled Heterotopia explores how Victorian artists and designers imagined alternative ways of living. Drawing from the Arcadia wallpaper design by May Morris and Mary Watts's tree of life motifs within the designs for the Watts Chapel, the work brings together two visions of an ideal, harmonious world central to Arts & Crafts thinking.
Dr Louise Atkinson is a visual artist, researcher, and facilitator whose practice sits at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, and ethnography. Dr Atkinson completed her practice-based PhD in Fine Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in 2016 and she currently holds a position as Visiting Research Fellow in the same department.
Her doctoral research examined how artists can work with museum practices of archiving, collecting and curating as creative strategies within contemporary art, particularly through collaborative and ethnographic methods.
Her artistic repertoire spans a wide range of media, from drawing, collage, textiles, sculpture, artist books, repeat pattern design and digital media, always underpinned by a rigorous investigation of visual culture and its social meanings. She frequently integrates co-production and co-curation, working with community participants to generate new narratives in response to existing collections, archives, and cultural objects.
A central strand of Dr Atkinson’s work is her engagement with wallpaper as a visual and cultural form for engaging overlooked histories, heritage, and identity. In recognition of her creative work in this field, she was awarded the 2024 Wallpaper History Society Merryl Huxtable Bursary, as well as publishing articles and delivering talks for the Society.
In 2025, she developed and delivered the participatory arts and heritage project If Walls Could Talk, which reimagined the Chinese export wallpaper in the East Bedroom at Harewood House through creative collaboration with Chinese-speaking community groups in Leeds. This project combined historical research with workshops in pattern design, photography and augmented reality, inviting audiences to consider the layered histories of decorative arts and belonging in today’s multicultural society.
Her augmented reality intervention Super/Market was exhibited at Harewood House, alongside the companion exhibition Pictures of Tilling and Weaving in the Project Space at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
Dr Atkinson is also Artist-in-Residence on the Wellcome Discovery Award-funded research project Cripping Breath: Towards a New Cultural Politics of Respiration, where she collaborates with disabled artists and researchers to investigate the cultural politics of breathing and ventilation through arts-based methods. She will be creating a wallpaper for Florence Nightingale Museum based on her project, The Museum of Breathing, which will be exhibited in February 2027.