We’ve got a few more weeks before the iPad arrives so I’ll quickly get in some book recommendations of the old-school variety (these might not be available through the iBook store anyway!) Joyce Storey’s book ‘Dyes and Fabrics’ (Thames and Hudson) was my bible when I first set up my print studio, also W. Clarke’s An Introduction to Textile Printing which is quite technical but essential if you want to mix your own dyestuffs. Another great book is ‘Fabric Dyeing & Printing’ by Kate Wells (Conran Octopus) – full of practical hands-on advice. A more recent book I think can be helpful for mixing conventional printing and digital work is Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac’s ‘Digital Textile Design’ (Laurence King Publishing), mixing digital with screen print, ink jet, heat transfer and with very good visual examples in tutorial form.

Posted in books, design, printing, technology, textiles

I quite often talk to students and the digital versus conventional debate frequently comes up, mainly because a lot of the textiles courses seem to teach through computer-based design origination rather than learning the craft of repeat construction. Many students haven’t grasped the fundamental elements of repeats and screen separations (it may look easy but it does take a lot of experience and is time consuming) making it very hard for them to pursue designs for commercial production. It seems that there needs to be a revival in teaching traditional printing processes (with the added enlightenment of CAD and digital prints). There was something good about using the photocopier and playing around with collage; something that I don’t see so much in students’ work because they seem to be very much focused on the final digital A3 paper print-out, which tends to look flat and uninspiring. Honing your fine art and craft skills does lead to a more interesting result.

So how can we get from here to what we can see at Premiere Vision with designers such as Claudia Caviezel (see Claudia’s wonderful interview on Faces of Design and her website) using digital in an exciting and stimulating way?

Spring 2009 Collection of AKRIS designed for Jakob Schlaepfer by Claudia Caviezel

Perhaps the answer is to introduce drawing, collage, lino cutting, wax relief printing, mono printing and many others handmade skills to try and turn the young students’ heads away from their computers. Maybe even ban them in the first year! It may sound harsh but it could work, after all, in my first year at Camberwell we had to work solely in black and white from painting to printing!

Posted in design, fashion, pattern, printing, technology, textiles, trends

In 2000, Bernard Ashley set up the print company Elanbach as a separate business from that of Laura Ashley and the company has worked really hard over the last few years to develop digital fabrics to a point at which they can be produced on a commercial scale. Now only printing for their own collection, they opened a great showroom at the Chelsea Harbour Design Centre in September and although the main direction of the designs is a bit twee for my tastes, Elanbach should be applauded for their commercial involvement in digital printing and for seeing its potential early on.

Elanbach Chelsea Harbour showroom

In some ways I think the digital fabrics might hold the key to breathing life back into this country’s fraying textile industry. With only a few companies really exploring digital printing in the UK, it might still be considered a cottage industry here, but having seen how it has taken off in Europe and South-East Asia, it seems a real growth area financially but also a way to be able to offer great creativity as well as a beautifully finished product. And we’re nothing, in the UK if not creative! Inks are becoming more light-fast and durable and as variety of what can be printed on keeps improving with fabrics like heavy linens, cottons and velvets in the mix, we’ll start seeing more digital prints in the home.

Posted in botanical, design, interior design, pattern, printing, technology, textiles

This summer, prints seem to have been very influenced by digital printing technology, with lots of examples which appeared in the catwalk shows now making their way onto the rails; Prada, the late Alexander McQueen and Matthew Williamson to name a few.

PRADA Summer 2010

Because of its flexibility and beauty of placement printing we will continue to see digital printing used commercially in fashion. Designers are willing to pay the price for the more expensive digital fabric but these are coming down and it is considerably cheaper than it was even 2 years ago.

I saw a lot more companies (mainly Italian) at Premiere Vision offering digital as well as conventional printed fabrics. The perfect product for this technique is the scarf. Sadly it’s often too expensive for small-scale designers to get involved in creating scarves as the quantities required to make the numbers work are too big, and unless you are a skilled printer they are very time consuming to produce oneself. I know because I have tried and although I was able to sell at great shops such as Paul Smith, Joseph and Bergdorf Goodman ultimately I couldn’t compete with the lower prices that manufacturers were getting from China. But as I said digital printing is becoming more affordable so look out for it on more scarves whether in Liberty or coming to a high street near you.

Posted in fashion, pattern, printing, technology, textiles, trends

At the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London Lincoln’s Inn Fields there’s a lovely exhibition of the work of Mrs Delany, née Mary Granville.

Born in 1700, in the days when embroidery and art showing pretty flowers was considered charming but not taken seriously because being female then, creating such things was regarded as a hobby. However, Mrs Delany’s is a considerable body of work in its own right, combining such a high level of skills, dedication and passion. Working at least 100 years before Marianne North of Kew Gardens fame, during her lifetime Mrs Delany built up a strong relationship with Kew Gardens who gave her plant specimens.

She started off with embroidery and sketching and then at the age of 72, she began her remarkable series of 1000 flower collages, Flora Delanica, now owned by the British Museum.

Portlandia Grandiflora, © The Trustees of the British Museum

She managed to get hold of glossy black and vibrantly coloured papers to make collages which, looking at them now, feel current, appealing and never twee.

I found it quite up lifting to see a woman’s work from this era held up in such high esteem and not just considered something to pass the time. She went about her work in a very methodical manner, organising her household to store the materials she would use to make her collages and embroideries. The collection of her sketchbooks depicting gardens scenes and delicate graphite fauna left me scraping my jaw off the floor! Through her visual style, techniques and by proving that a woman could be considered a serious artist, in many ways Mrs Delany was way ahead of her time.

Everybody should go to see this exhibition it’s free and at the wonderful Sir John Soane Museum where one should never need an excuse to visit the fantastic yellow room!

‘Mrs Delany’ and Her Circle is on until 1^st May.

Posted in art, botanical, craft, handmade, review, vintage

Continuing my cultural whirlwind, I went to see Chris Ofili’s exhibition at Tate Britain. One of the most acclaimed British painters of his generation, Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998 and was also chosen to represent Great Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. The current exhibition is a major survey of his work, gathering together his intensely coloured and intricately ornamented paintings with pencil drawings and watercolours from the mid 1990s to today.

For me it was The Upper Room that took my breath away, even though I have seen it before it still captures my gaze and transports me into a blaze of colour and pattern, I love David Adjaye’s wooden room installation it really makes it feel very organic and smells wonderful too. I also loved the line drawings and how your focus is drawn to the dots or circles that seemed to have little faces and Afro heads in them. His latest series of paintings are much less decorative and have a magical and spiritual feel.

Here are a few quotations from reviews of the exhibition to whet your appetite before you go:

‘Hip, cool and wildly inventive’ – The Guardian

‘You can’t fail to be entertained’ – The Times

‘Modern Master of radiant colour’ – Daily Telegraph

Think that sums it up!

The exhibition is on until 16^th May.

Posted in art, colour, review

Wallpaper, Art and Culture. 6th February – 3rd May 2010

Popped up to Manchester for the ‘Walls are Talking’ private view at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Outside of London, it has the UK’s largest collection of wallpapers and as it’s the first exhibition to bring together artists’ working with wallpaper, it’s definitely worth seeing.

As I am a huge fan of Thomas Demand it was great to have another chance to see his Ivy wallpaper hung in a vast space, although it did seem to be have little less impact than it had had at the Serpentine in 2006. I wondered if this was partly down to the enormous height of the Whitworth’s ceilings and also due to not including those large photographs that it was shown with at the Serpentine space, which made the room of ivy look like it had windows. What unnerves about this paper is the sense of being confined and constricted by the dense ivy, which is perhaps how it was supposed to make you feel. The feeling is strengthened knowing that Demand’s inspiration for the ivy pattern came from a series of photographs of a tavern; a site that had been the scene for a horrific child murder, killed by its mother and step- sister.

Inspiration for the Ivy wallpaper:

Thomas Demand, Klause - Tavern, © Thomas Demand-DACS

Another gruesome murder scene is enacted in Abigail Lane’s ‘Bloody Wallpaper’ where bloodstain hand prints of the murder victim on a plain cream background are on show. But on a lighter note! I also liked Catherine Bertola’s 3D-esque installations, they reminded me of Katsuyo Kamo’s paper cut outs for Chanel. She used soot from her fire to print or stamp the floral images, which were then cut out with some floating down the walls, very Alice in wonderland !

Catherine Bertola, Whitworth Walls Are Talking 2010

Her work was perhaps (for me) the most inspiring for pushing the boundaries and for leaving you with some kind of emotional sense. By using paper in a different way than just the flat she leads nicely towards Tracy Kendal’s work. I did wonder why she (Tracy) wasn’t included in this section as her work is a fine example of 3D art wallpaper and crosses the boundaries of art and designer very nicely. And there were other surprising omissions not just individuals but a whole era.

I know this exhibition focuses mainly on the 1970s onwards but it did seem a shame that there wasn’t a reference to the 40’s – 50’s period. For example the Coles and Sons wallpapers by leading artists such as Graham Sutherland, John Aldridge and Edward Bawden and Bowden’s again a little earlier for the Curwen Press. I had always thought that this was quite a good time for the cross over of artists working in wallpaper and of course more predominantly fabrics.

What ‘Walls are Talking’ says is that wallpaper isn’t just decorative but can be a medium for social commentary. It certainly is a thought-provoking exhibition, exploring themes of sexuality gender, race, war, outside in, chemical warfare, politics to mention a few with artists such as Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Michael Craig-Martin and Angus Fairhurst using wallpaper to make bold artistic statements. Sarah Lucas’ ‘Tits in Space’ always makes me smile with its cigarettes neatly arranged into compact, pert cones!

Tits in Space © Sarah Lucas, Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London

This is definitely a thought provoking exhibition and very enjoyable, there were some pieces that were more pictures rather than wallpaper; especially the ones that were canvas stretched over frames, perhaps these could have been bigger pieces so that the effect could have been felt more. But that is what opens up the discussions on ‘when does a wallpaper become a work of art?’ The majority of the papers on show weren’t made for residential use making it a very interesting take on the wallpaper today issues.

Posted in botanical, design, interior design, pattern, review, wallpaper

What I love about going to Premier Vision is that not only is it a great opportunity to peer ahead, check out trends and see cutting edge technologies that are the results of years of R&D but you get to pick up stuff (literally and mentally) that you might not normally find or have easy access to. Here’s a good example, it’s a beautifully produced colour journal called ‘Le fil du lin & du chanvre’ which gives an overview of how linen and hemp are being used across the board in design.

Le fil du lin & du chanvre, n°03

I also found ‘Geometric’, a brilliant book by Kapitza – a design studio up the road from here set up by 2 sisters. It’s great fun, loaded with 100 pattern fonts (shapes based on the forms of letters in the alphabet) and something I’m definitely looking forward to playing with. Some of the patterns reminded me of the Dutch artist and designer Karel Martens who is a favourite of mine. You can buy the book from the Kapitza online shop:

One last notable mention from Premier Vision: Jakob Schlaepfer’s brand new, awe-inspiring fabric ‘Secret Garden’, a shimmering silver gossamer with iridescent inks printed onto it. It’s one of those fabrics that photographs really don’t do justice to, you have to see it up close and feel it yourself. So, lucky me! Look out for this in the coming years time in clothing and interiors.

Posted in books, design, graphic design, pattern, review, technology, trends