exhibition

London Pattern Day: Paint! Pattern! Print!

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Having visited the Women in Print, 150 years of Liberty textiles at the William Morris Gallery, I headed to Liberty to see the latest fabrics and bought myself a Merchant & Mills pattern and Liberty Tana Lawn printed fabric as a holiday project, which I can proudly share I have completed and am waiting for warmer weather to show it off!

The primary reason for visiting London at the end of last month was to attend the Private View of the exhibition: Paint! Pattern! Print – The Textiles of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell at the Fashion and Textile Museum, so I headed to Bermondsey, near London Bridge for the evening. Thanks Sarah for the invite! On arrival at the museum we were greeted by Sarah and much to my amusement she presented me with a pink takeaway fork from her pocket – for my fork collection!

I first met Sarah in London about ten years ago, having got in touch with her via Twitter when that was a nice place to be! Someone had the nerve to copy some of Sarah’s work, so I reached out to offer my sympathy and we decided to meet up the next time I was in London. As an academic I was in the capital for New Designers, the graduate showcase at the Business Design Centre, so we arranged to meet. We spent well over an hour putting the world of pattern in its place and we have stayed in touch ever since, with Sarah judging student awards for me, and joining me on an industry panel I was chairing at New Designers in 2023, having been kind enough to allow me to feature her work in my book, Repeat Printed Pattern for Interiors, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. I was delighted to see this book stocked at the Fashion and Textile Museum – thanks to the Liberty team for taking the picture of me and my book!

On entering the exhibition it was a complete feast for the eyes … with pattern and colour everywhere, appearing from around corners, up above and room after room. This was a true dive into the archives of Collier Campbell textiles over decades of working together, two sisters and a shared vision for joyous textiles. The exhibition included a wide range of items designed by Susan and Sarah, from the drawing and painting tools, to loose sketches and scaled painted designs on paper to lengths of printed fabrics, interior products and dresses. There were examples of Sarah’s more recent collaborations with Magpie and West Elm, alongside press cuttings featuring both Susan and Sarah at home and wielding paint brushes.

As a child growing up in the 1980s the look of home textiles, if not Laura Ashley, was likely to be Collier Campbell. With bolder and colourful brush marks suggesting the joy of Les Fauves artists, Matisse and Derain, rather than the Victorian Gothic tight sprigs Laura Ashley celebrated. I remember visiting the exhibition at London’s National Theatre in 2011, celebrating fifty years of sisters Susan and Sarah designing in 2011, shortly after Susan died. I recall loving the energy in the painting and bold use of colours.

In this current exhibition, as is the legacy of the archives, the patterns are rhythmic in their flow and scale; musical in spirit. Motifs are often geometrics, florals and birds, and famously designs such as Cote d’Azure, evoke summer scenes in Europe as the sisters worked to deadlines only imagining the holiday season. It was wonderful to see the paperwork for this piece, having included it in my book, Repeat … that features an interview with Sarah and images of key pieces by Collier Campbell.

A design new to me that I really enjoyed seeing was Dancing Squares, from 1990 for American company UTICA (Stevens). This huge length of hand printed paper over two and a half metres long features painted squares evolving from dark to light up the design (right hand image below). The design on the left, again one I wasn’t familiar with, was a huge collage of a table of food and drink, in warm reds and oranges complemented by blue and turquoise.

The florals and bird designs were full of life, with painted textures and pattern. It was also good to see the colour chips on the sides of some designs to guide the printers for production, as well as notes for the artworks and printers. The designs have depth as Susan and Sarah played with backgrounds and foregrounds as equal importance. Display cabinets showcased works on paper and coordinating designs alongside their hero prints as large statements on the wall and hanging as lengths.

Everyone was friendly. I chatted to several people during the evening as we shared our joy of the work on show and the speeches by the curator as well as Sarah celebrated the pure joy that pattern, colour and creativity can provide. I was excited to have the opportunity to talk to Zandra Rhodes, the founder of the museum, and who continues to inspire us all, including the students I teach at Norwich.

I have only shared some of the many photographs I took on the evening, but I strongly recommend the show to anyone who loves printed pattern. It is the perfect tonic for the times we are living in, and a beautiful reminder of the joy to be found in painted and printed pattern! Congratulations to Sarah and the curatorial team of Teresa Collenette and Dennis  Nothdruft at the Fashion and Textile Museum.

I sat on the train back to Norwich with my heart filled with excitement for the world of pattern I belong in, energised to support the next generation of designers I am working with at Norwich over the coming months. It was a day of celebrating Sarah and her sister Susan, having seen so many of their designs in the two exhibitions I visited – what a truly impressive legacy to be inspired by!

London pattern day: Liberty / Women in Print

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

I spent a busy day in London this week, with focus on print and pattern. It was fabulous! My first destination was the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow in east London. I can thoroughly recommend the exhibition, Women in Print: 150 years of Liberty Textiles, on until Sunday 21st June 2026, in conjunction with Liberty Fabrics.

The exhibition spread across two floors of the gallery with a number of rooms and corridors showcasing some old favourites of printed textiles and related works on papers, alongside some lesser known pieces and associated garments.

The introductory video for the exhibition gave an insight to the role of women at Liberty with old photographs and recent interviews. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing old favourites throughout the exhibition, with works by Sonia Delaunay, Althea McNish, Jacqueline Groag and Susan Collier & Sarah Campbell as well as being introduced to names I wasn’t aware of, including Mrs Stoneley and Winifred Mold. I hadn’t realised Lucienne Day only designed one design (Fritillary) for Liberty, with it being agreed she would design for Heals while Robert Stewart would design for Liberty!

There was a second video upstairs, filmed in the 1970s that showcased the print and dye work with some rather random models in Liberty clothes wandering in and out of shot, by the print tables and dye vats in swimwear! When I discussed this with Sarah Campbell later that evening she joked it was her and Susan, the design duo behind Collier Campbell – exhibition now on in London’s Fashion and Textile Museum and featured in my next blog post!

The exhibition is free to attend, with donations to the gallery gratefully received.

Congratulations to curators, Rowan Bain and Róisín Inglesby.

Susan Collier & Sarah Campbell, scarf design featuring the Liberty shopfront

Sonia Delaunay scarf design

Liberty swatch

Lucienne Day’s ‘Fritillary’, her only design for Liberty

Sarah Campbell’s notebook, double-spread

Collier Campbell ‘Kazak’ design

Collier Campbell for Liberty, featuring Bauhaus, inspired by Gunta Stolzl, the weave master at the Bauhaus, Germany

PLAY prints on show

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

I am really pleased to have had two of my most recent works on paper selected to be included in the Print Cromer exhibition this summer, with the Private View on 19th July. This new body of work has been developed as part of my academic practice at Norwich University of the Arts where I have been exploring pattern structures and repeat blocks. I have explored new pattern iterations by rotating the screens to add additional colours of the same artwork, thereby building greater complexity from limited design information. In an age where digital design and the use of Artificial Intelligence provides limitless opportunities, I want to explore the fundamentals of pattern creation to generate new possibilities that are led by the designer, ensuring the creative path is transparent.

The theme of the exhibition is PLAY, and as a result the palette I created feels full of summer carnivals and fairgrounds. The overprinting of inks with differing levels of transparency provides a building of depth and subtlety of harmonious colour.

I created a number of one, two, three and four-colour prints initially, that featured the screen rotation in adding the colours. I then cut strips of the prints and with further rotation of the strips, interwove them into one base print that had been sliced to enable the slotting. I enjoyed bringing back an element of paper engineering from my book art practice into these new pieces.

In designing each piece, I considered the placement of motifs and relationships of colour. The collection provides variation within a collective identity and belonging. Some pieces feature only triangular motifs, while most incorporate the circular and rectangular elements too. My research utilises design thinking by Lewis Foreman Day, and his distribution of elements. This approach results in scattered focal motifs that work across repeating patterns. Although this is not a feature of my new work, I recognise the placement considerations are also useful in this work too.

A number of these pieces will be for sale during the show.

Electric Dreams at Tate Modern

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

I visited the Electric Dreams exhibition on at Tate Modern, London, until 1st June 2025 and thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition that ranged from 2D artworks, sound, kinetic sculpture, light projections and installations, featuring international artists and groups. Mathematical systems and rules, machine-controlled movement as well as material and pattern play resulted in a fascinating show I thoroughly recommend.

The exhibition was described as ‘art and technology before the internet’ and included C20th items from the Pop Art era through to early computing and video work. Our perception and senses were being challenged in many ways as we experienced the installations and artefacts. Some exhibits performed constantly, others, often featuring movement or light were timed, so I worked my way back and forth between the rooms to ensure I’d seen all I could in performance mode. The current trend for immersive gallery experiences were put in to context in this exhibition.

Left to right: Atsuko Tanaka (pic 1 & 2), Francois Morellet

Left to right / top to bottom: Otto Pine, Julio Le Parc, Martha Boto, Alberto Biasi, Analivia Cordeiro

installation: Carlos Cruz-Diez

Left to right: Mariana Apollonia, Lucia Di Luciano

weaver extraordinaire: Anni Albers

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

If you are interested in textiles and haven’t heard about the Anni Albers show now on at Tate Modern in London, then a.) where have you been? and b.) get there fast if you can!

This has been a much anticipated show for me. Having been enjoying many other people’s pictures via Instagram since the exhibition opened I was most excited to get to the show and I’m so glad I did – I went round it several times and breathed in the history I had learned as an art student myself; typewriter patterns from Bauhaus lessons, the infamous diploma piece with sounds absorbing properties in the yarn, and those classic Bauhaus photographs, but there was so much more. Colour, cloth, pattern, rhythms, photographs, works on paper, products … The woven structures and yarns drew everyone in for a closer look – so much so that the alarms kept being set off and the guilty took a sheepish step back! There was a fascinating display of the research of historical textiles from Albers’ own collection that made perfect sense in how she interpreted and worked with the process of weaving.

annialbers_s

Experimental, commercial commissions, religious pieces and jewellery are some of the aspects of this considerable show. As with most well-received shows, the audience conversations themselves were fascinating; lots of discussions about experiences of weaving, hours at the loom as well as working out what she must have done.

It has been the architects, the painters and the product designers, usually men, who have become far more well known from the Bauhaus, including Anni’s husband Josef Albers. The avant-garde German art school’s first director Walter Gropius stated there were equal opportunities for all when it was established in 1919 and yet women were generally encouraged towards the textiles workshop, a place and craft deemed more suitable. Anni never let this distract from her focus despite wanting to be a painter. Her creative output of a lifetime, as edited in this exhibition, goes a long way to demonstrate her will to explore both the context of design and the development of art. She will have no doubt inspired many who have been introduced to her as a result of the show and her legacy will continue to influence far beyond the context of textiles as a craft for women. I came away with many notes and a head filled textile excitement – happy weaving everyone!

Exhibition ends: 27th January 2019