Soulful Pattern

Here is final collection for my BA Textile Design Course at Chelsea College of Art based on five pattern-making experiments that tried to get under the skin of pattern and see if it could be anything more than skin deep. 

Together with gardening friends on my local allotments, at Spa Hill in Upper Norwood, I have created different pattern stories that reflect a time, a person and a place. You can read more about their stories at  www.spahill.blogspot.co.uk

Through collaboration, I wanted to create a recipe for pattern-making with soul: a way of using pattern to re-enchant and beguile the eye, encouraging people to look more closely and care more deeply about the world around them.

A HUGE thank you to the pattern-makers - Stinky aka Sarah Newton and Isabelle, Eileeen Ward, Beverley and Thabo Witter and Tim Gundry-White. Thanks also to Martin Cleave for the beautiful photographs.

You can meet the pattern makers by watching a short film I made about them at  http://youtu.be/ft2Fh6x_dZY

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Curtains

These are the final printed lengths for my latest project - Space Invaders. I experimented with readymade patterns, transforming them through resist printing, overprinting, dying and bleaching. I learned that gloss binder resists well but was unable to rediscover how William Morris got his indigo to discharge.

I also learned to start looking a bit more slowly - even though I don't think I will ever stop printing too fast. I'm preparing some more resist designs - light projections taken from natural shapes and forms.  I'm inspired by the Japanese designer, Soetsu Yangagi who describes patterns - not as reproductions of nature but as new creations, visions of what is reflected by the imagination. So I've been keeping a pattern diary. Each day collecting at least 6 patterns from the world around me. It's becoming addictive.