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For Adolf Loos, objects which lacked the autonomy and industrial qualities he associated with contemporaneity were "full of references to abstract things, full of symbols and memories. They are medieval."1 The paintings by Elizabeth Pulie recently installed in Sutton Gallery also link the pre-modern with the Middle Ages, challenging notions of decorative design and its relation to abstract painting. Elizabethan Gold is a suite of heraldic designs painted in gold liquid leaf on deep crimson, green and blue and installed in a tableau reminiscent of a 19th century salon hang. Pinned to cover one wall of the smaller gallery are pages of a repeated gold and black daisy pattern entitled William Morris Gold. Central to the connection Pulie makes between these two sections is Morris's conception of the medieval arts as one source for design but more importantly as the origin of his philosophy for 19th century artist-craftsmen, a vision of medieval society as egalitarian and communal and the source of a living spiritual and artistic tradition.
In her literal taking of various motifs and styles as found designs for her practice, Pulie situates her paintings at one end of a conglomeration of histories. Her motifs are the types dismissed as ornamentation by the male "pioneers" of modern design in the twentieth century, men whose definitions of "honesty" and "morals" were at odds with the adherents of the Arts and Craft movement. Antithetical to the modernist project of reductivism and simplification, the practice and definition of decoration, ornament, design and pattern became embroiled in the subjective vocabulary of taste, with its baggage of contradictions; authentic/debased, tradition/corruption, integrity/vulgarity, fine art/craft. Pulie and Morris connect across the modernist despair of decoration; Morris's