textile design

Design inspirations 2: the natural world

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Second in the series of ‘Design Inspirations’ blog entries…

The natural world has long been an inspiration for textile designers. Many years on from William Morris celebrating the natural world of flora and fauna as decoration for textiles we have had Laura Ashley, Marimekko and Orla Kiely, to only name three companies, who have interpreted the natural world and created stylised patterns and imagery which continue to inspire design students of today.

At times the worst thing as a lecturer of design we can hear from a student is that their project will be “about shells” and we dread the worst examples of static and bland studies which do little to explore the beauty and wonder of the natural world’s creations of form, structure, surface, pattern, colour and more, before approaching the bountiful concepts and metaphors in the ‘dot to dot’ of design processing hidden around the shell!

In my drawings I often aim to distil and to simplify a plant structure or shape of a flower in order to create motifs for prints and surface patterns, exploring perspective, diagrammatic language and relationships with place / context. I have a huge archive of drawings made on locations as well as boxes and bags of samples including plants, stones & leaves and one day they may well feature in designs. You never now what you might need! Going anywhere new, even for a holiday means that I keep my eyes open and often pockets filled as a result of finding new things.

Having visited the Gower peninsula for one last summer camping trip I came across these examples of natural forms, which could and would create different visual interpretations in the hands of each creative prepared for the job. That is one reason why I like to play a part in design education; to facilitate the looking, seeing and interpreting, and it is certainly why I like to keep on collecting, and keep on drawing.

 

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a textile archive of a different kind

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Having worked at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, BCU at the Gosta Green site for the last few years we are moving to a brand new campus next week. There has been plenty to do packing up the workshops and studios, and during this process the course team have reflected on and recorded the space that has been home to this textile design degree for many years.

There are so many signs of demonstrations given, lectures delivered, course-work carried out and with the heavy use of the workshops comes a fabulous visual archive of the textile careers that we have helped to initiate and support along the way. We are nostalgic in many ways, but excited by the new and very clean slate that we are about to start writing history on at the Parkside building.

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Kate Farley – Plotting Prints at Tinsmiths

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It is a very exciting time for me. It has been about two years in the planning and preparation stages and now we are a week in to my show at Tinsmiths. For those of you unfamiliar with Tinsmiths, it is a beautiful textile and lighting shop in the lovely Herefordshire market town of Ledbury. It is a beautifully considered shop, owned by Phoebe Clive, selling a wide range of fabrics as well as home wares, crafted pieces and artists prints.

I have worked closely with Phoebe to translate my lino printed designs inspired by allotments, to become a collection of heavy weight linen, hand screen printed textiles available to buy as cushions. We have also created larger showroom pieces as curtains and upholstered chairs in preparation for selling some of the designs by the metre later in the year.

Phoebe and the team have styled my products throughout the top floor of the premises in such a way as to create a clean and fresh interior space, working with the other products and furniture pieces in the shop. My prints and drawings are set amongst other exciting colour statements in the form of ceramics & lighting with an understated aesthetic. With plenty of positive feedback at the PV as well as sales throughout the first week it’s a really exciting reward for the long journey to this point.

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Hanbury Hall delights

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My creative practice has been inspired by National Trust gardens for the last few years and as a result I’ve had a number of people suggest I visit Hanbury Hall – finally I got round to it at the weekend. Despite the poor weather it was a delight to discover all the pockets of gardens, each carefully considered, and demonstrating the wide variety of formal and informal planting the National Trust excels at.

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Armed with my sketchbook and camera I gathered plenty of inspiration for new prints and will definitely be back later in the season.

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Its also a fantastic building inside and out. I dashed around the inside and a particular wallpaper caught my attention.

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All in all, I left feeling excited about making new work again having spent so long preparing for my solo show at Tinsmiths, opening later this month… now where did I put that lino?

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tribal textiles in the Midlands

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Happy New year to you!

Seeing as I work in the professional world of textiles I’m not surprised that I spend more time than most considering our relationship with textiles. To simplify things – I question what relationship we have with fabric, and the inspiration behind our choices of garments and the materials, colours and patterns that we fill our wardrobes with – when we’ve picked the clothes up from the floor!

To celebrate the new year we went to Alvechurch to see the Alvechurch Morris dancers who put on a show each New Year in the pub car park of the Crown Inn at Withybed. As well as their dances they also perform their entertaining politically cheeky response to the past year’s news in the shape of a traditional George and the Dragon style Mummer’s play. They were also joined by several other dance groups from the region, all proudly dressed in variations of what you would expect Morris dancers to be wearing. There were plenty of pairs of beige jumbo corduroy trousers, and of course the bells round the lower leg, but the use of the strips of fabrics on the backs of the jackets and the feathers in hats really made it a spectacle of eccentric British-ness some would be surprised to see still in existence.

Having lectured on the subject of textiles for a number of years and having tried to make the education experience not British-centric the experience of seeing the Morris dancers in Alvechurch are a reminder of our own tribal dress; just as interesting, ceremonial, entertaining and socially telling as some tribal dress from far flung corners of the world a long way from here.

Some outfits appear rather more planned than others and its tricky to see if some are trying to look ‘thrown together’ but are to the contrary. Some groups (is there a collective noun for Morris dancers?) stick to set colours and one group of women were a sort of goth vamp group at Halloween with a dash of silver – I mean that in the nicest way! Personally I prefer the more traditional looking ones with a collection of faded what looks like Laura Ashley prints alongside stripes and spots. They look more like a mood board than a dance outfit.

Of course the sound and movement is lacking in the photographs but I hope they go someway to celebrate the dress code found in one small pub car park in the Midlands today and every New Years Day.

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http://www.alvechurch-morris.org.uk/index.htm

http://www.thecrownalvechurch.co.uk/index.html

sharing the design process of Plot to Plate

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Given that I am about to take my Plot to Plate collection of designs to Top Drawer this weekend I thought people might be interested in the design journey of ideas that result in such a collection of pattern.

My ideas tend to belong as series of thoughts that I explore in a number of drawings over months, and sometimes years. I challenge myself to explore many ways to represent the same things, often resulting in simplified motifs, some would say scribbles. Drawings are often in rather utilitarian handmade sketchbooks that are not precious so there is no fear of the white blank page before I start. Sometime, in fact quite often, I draw while walking, and trying not to look conspicuous or weird as I track my way round a National Trust kitchen garden, almost creating a diagram, literally a planting plan as I go. Sometimes I make notes in my drawings, of colours, names of plants from the labels in the ground, or note references to research at a later date.

The titles of some of my designs are: xvo, xo, xxvv and these come from the shorthand I created in order to document gardens and allotments as I paced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the studio, and for sometime after I dwell, I study, I revisit the motifs, rhythms and compositions I gathered, I redraw, formalise and create new pieces, as one-off drawings in series to exhibit and sell. Some compositions lend themselves to self-contained lino prints or screenprints and so I spend time developing the designs, cutting the plates, and enjoying the process of editioning. I could never imagine getting bored (my edition sizes are small!) of lifting the paper from an inked block, each time to discover the image. So low-tech, yet engaging.

At this point I notice elements that can be scanned in and reworked in Photoshop or Illustrator software to create repeat designs and colourways for further potential – and this is how I created the design collection of ‘Plot to Plate’.

The Plot to Plate signature design of garden, kitchen and dining tools also came from my playing with the dog-tooth check as a classic rhythm, and my keen interest in telling a story as a visual narrative. Pattern can of course be pretty, but I enjoy the challenge of asking it to communicate something beyond itself. In this instance my drawings were made directly for this purpose and I translated them for screen.

I hope the images explain the fun I have had, and the pride that I feel in this collection.

 

More examples of prints and drawings can be found on my website gallery pages

www.katefarley.co.uk

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Thank you Tinsmiths

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With a sense of pride I bring news that my ‘Plot to Plate’ collection of textile and paper products are currently stocked at Tinsmiths, Ledbury. This is a beautiful shop of wonderful fabrics and finds in a really interesting building. I have an exhibition there next June (2013) so we have been making plans and discussing new hand-printed textile designs to launch then. I look forward to working with the Tinsmiths team…