How Much is Enough? by Freddie Yauner is a two-screen film exploring a speculative encounter between William Morris and George Frederic Watts.
Commissioned by Watts Gallery, the artwork, titled How Much is Enough? reimagines William Morris sitting for his portrait by G F Watts. Appearing as Morris, Yauner explores the tension between the stillness required of portraiture and the restless, active mind of the writer-designer-political thinker. Moments of distraction give way to song, suggesting the pull of Morris’s wider concerns, particularly his commitment to social change and alternative ways of living, as articulated in his novel News from Nowhere (1890). A second visual strand introduces imagery from the gardens at Watts Gallery, offering a shifting, sensory counterpart to the act of sitting. Natural forms that informed Morris’s designs are foregrounded, revealing how close observation of the natural world shaped his approach to pattern.
Freddie Yauner is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how the human drive for continual growth has impacted people and the planet. He makes work that celebrates nature, unpicks ideas of progress and explores the cognitive dissonance needed to be a human alive today.
His work often plays with the familiar to bring people into the unfamiliar, sometimes implicating himself or going to ridiculous lengths to shift viewers’ perspectives. Freddie makes paint out of pollen, goes for walks wearing a mirrored mask, takes photos using a flat-bed scanner and spends the first three months each year trying to become William Morris.
Freddie believes that Art can carry important and urgent ideas and start new conversations - and in doing so is a vital lever for change.
Freddie’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally and is included in the several permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
He lives and works in London.