Decorate the Dungeon

The world of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, while very different from our world 101 years later, was still a fractured and difficult time—a time that could be made bearable through embracing ornament. My piece is a digital dungeon that can be decorated through finding parts of architectural ornamentation circa 1925. I researched online archives to locate scanned photos of drawings and photographs from the time period that showed the architectural ornamentation of places that were mentioned in the novel, all of which are still standing today. When thinking of the theme “ornament,” I wanted to convey how ornament makes life a little bit sweeter, a little more bearable, and a little less ugly. Virginia Woolf says it best in Mrs Dalloway: “As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”