A Polynesian Reconnection: Identifying Len Lye in the V&A Collection

In 2019, while researching the Footprints Studio, I encountered this batik cushion in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The work was attributed only to the studio, yet it was immediately identifiable as a work by Len Lye. This recognition carries particular weight given the broader context of Lye’s representation in museum collections.

Len Lye, untitled batik cushion, 1920s. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Side A.

Len Lye, untitled batik cushion, 1920s. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Side B.

At present, the cushion appears to be the only non-film work by Lye held in a British museum. This absence is striking, especially considering his activity in London during the late 1920s, including his involvement in avant-garde circles such as the Seven and Five Society and, later, the British Surrealist group. While numerous American collections hold examples of Lye’s kinetic sculpture – largely due to the advocacy of gallerist Howard Wise – his earlier and more materially diverse practice is scarcely represented. Beyond a single, obscure ex-libris print from the mid-1920s in the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, this batik also stands as the only currently identified example of Lye’s work beyond sculpture in a northern hemisphere collection.

During his association with the Footprints Studio, located at Durham Wharf in Hammersmith, Lye produced a number of batiks in the form of shawls, cushions, and curtains. These works were not confined to exhibition contexts. Instead, they circulated more informally – frequently gifted, and possibly also sold, to a circle of friends and acquaintances that included Lady Gwen Herbert, Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, Robert Graves, and Jack Ellitt. While a number of these works survive in the Len Lye Foundation collection, those that entered private hands have largely been lost. An untold number of textile works were produced during this period; at present, around twenty identifiable examples can be accounted for, though the survival of the V&A cushion suggests that many more were originally made.

The V&A cushion can be directly connected to Lye’s well-known batik shawl Polynesian Connection (1928), which was exhibited with the Seven and Five Society in London. Lye himself described Polynesian Connection as the work “to become the best liked by the public,” signalling both its accessibility and its importance within his early practice. His participation in the Seven and Five Society placed him within a network of artists committed to abstraction and formal innovation, offering an important early platform for his work. Within this context, his batiks align with a broader modernist tendency to collapse distinctions between fine and applied art.

Polynesian Connection, batik, 1928. Len Lye Foundation Collection.

At the centre of Polynesian Connection is a pair of male and female figures locked together in what Lye described as a “two as one” union. This motif directly relates to his sculpture Unit, exhibited with the Seven and Five Society the previous year, and itself indebted to Brancusi’s Kiss sculptures. The composition is structured around this polarity, with the image often divided into two halves that echo the duality of the figures. In later reflections on the work, Lye described this union as symbolic of “the male-female sex polarity … [which] exists in the bi-sexual nature of individuality,” framing the image as a meditation on both tension and harmony.

The V&A cushion, however, does not reproduce this central motif. Instead, it isolates peripheral elements from the larger composition – vegetal forms and a lizard – cropped and rendered in a more vibrant, less earthy palette. This selective focus raises questions about the object’s origin. It may represent fragments cut from a larger textile (perhaps a rejected or secondary version of the exhibited work), or a deliberate adaptation designed specifically for use as a cushion. Each of these possibilities points to the fluidity with which Lye’s designs moved between exhibition and domestic contexts.

Other elements described by Lye in relation to later versions of Polynesian Connection – including jagged, arching spikes suggesting stress, and the image of a lizard devouring its mate – reinforce the complexity of the composition from which the cushion is drawn. What appears in the V&A work as decorative motif is, in its original context, part of a larger symbolic system.

Unit (left), a 1979 painting revisit of Polynesian Connection (centre), and Tusalava cushion (right) in the Motion Composer exhibition at Museum Tinguely (2019). Len Lye Foundation Collection. Photo: Nicholas Lieber and Museum Tinguely.

Other batik cushions by Lye are known, including examples in the Len Lye Foundation collection based on imagery from his film Tusalava (above). Together, these works suggest that the V&A cushion is not an isolated anomaly but part of a broader, body of textile production only partially visible today.