I was pleased to be commissioned by Unico, a popular chain of interiors stores in Japan, to produce two screen print editions for their autumn/winter collection.

See here for more, and below are some photos of the prints on the shop floor. It's been great to work with Unico and many thanks to my japanese agent Arlequin for their great organisation in this quick turnaround project.

Some of my prints have also been exhibited over the last year in some exhibitions in some really interesting locations in Japan. Many thanks again to Arlequin.

Photos courtesy of Arlequin.

A couple of weeks on from returning from my trip to New York, and then a trip to Bristol and Cornwall straight after, I am now back in one spot, and all that has occurred in the past month is beginning to be absorbed.

I was lucky in that a great deal of the exhibitions there seemed to cross over in a serendipitous way, in an area I find exciting in Art history; German Expressionism at MoMA, The Great Uprising at The Guggenheim, Sonia Delauney at Cooper Hewitt Design museum, the general collection at the Neue Galerie. The overriding sensation I was left with, especially with the incredible Sonia Delauney show, was the bold grasp with colour the early 20th century artists had. I also saw some beautiful and colourful Peruvian weavings in the flesh at the Met, which added to this feeling that I will probably now attribute to New York as a whole.

So on my return I have been keen to try and do something in colour, I wanted to make something quickly as a sort of knee jerk reaction to everything.

Working often in indian ink, I have sometimes had misfortunes with spillages, and indian ink is a terrible thing to spill. I had such an incident on opening my suitcase in new york. A new dress beared the brunt, so when I returned to London I set about trying to repair the damage, after a few experiments I used the indian ink mixed with water to dye the fabric, from a nude colour to a silver tone. Continuing on from the bands I have been weaving before I designed a segmented design, with the intention to wear it as a belt to go with the dress, which now being quite dull and uneven in tone, would benefit from flat bold colour. For the colour choice I took a cue from the colours I normally wear as accessories, bright primary colours, and also from the first sample I ever made weaving.

I am eager to explore designing and making more bands, tapes and belts and also to investigate dyeing techniques with fabric. There is another weaving project I have my mind on, which will be a longterm project, to create weavings and furnishings for the barn my parents are renovating in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. My father is a brilliant architect and this is a project he has long dreamed of doing and has been working on for the last couple of years. It is wonderful to see it being realised. I will talk more about it soon because there are so many exciting features and elements to his design. The barn has been untouched for many years and the landscape has grown up amongst it, which is being incorperated into the design rather than overcome, this balance of the man-made/ creativity and nature is perhaps something I want to look at in the weavings. He has recently set up his own architectural practice which you can visit here where you can see more about this project. In July I will visit the barn and begin the process of setting about it all.

I am on holiday from tomorrow May 12th until May 24th in New York. Any orders placed in my shop will not be posted until the 25th. If anyone has any recommendations for anything in New York, particularly related to weaving, let me know! Thank you

I was asked to take part in an exhibition happening on the LSE campus, to make a response to the building of St Philips, a place rich in social history due to be demolished to make way for a more modern design for the University.

The show entitled 'Students, patients and paupers' due to the use of the building throughout its history as a workhouse, then hospital, then academic building aims to celebrate the many lives of the building. When exploring the building I was told about how the building's turn of the century design echoed changing ideas of how workhouses were being built to stop the spread of disease by being highly ventilated, light and spacious places whereas previous ideas had been to make the buildings undesirable places to discourage people from wanting to be there.

With this in mind I paid attention to the details of design within the building that related to improving the lives of the inhabitants, and the fragments of activity within the vast white walls.

I chose to make a long vertical weaving, the composition echoing my initial walk of the building.

Colour theory technique experiment

Woven back to back with my san gimignano weaving project and with only 5 days from seeing the building to opening night, this was an intense project but enjoyable; I chose to use whatever resources I had already which forced me to find solutions to problems I had. One for instance was I did not have the right colours to reflect the colours in the building so I tried to use a colour theory technique I had read about recently in the Interactions of Color by Josef Albers which places colours of different values in a relationship so that the eye sees a colour of a middle value between the two. I want to continue exploring colour in the way, which makes sense in the way I already explore tones in the use of stripes in the monochrome work.

It is an excellent and superbly organised exhibition; on for a few more days if you get a chance go along and have a look.

Lately I have been using my San Gimignano wallpaper design to investigate the pictorial possibilities available within weaving, in this case, using the tapestry technique which is a weft-faced technique, ie the warp is completely covered and acts as a frame for the horizontal wefts.

I decided to weave the designs in a strap/band formation as a lot of current inspiration is drawn from weaving in this method, firstly in the form of ancient peruvian bands and tapes and also secondly in some woven furniture I have been looking at.

Scans from 'Textiles of Ancient Peru' by Raoul D'harcourt

In february I went to Gothenburg, and one afternoon we took a walk around the Design museum and spent a nice long time in the most comfortable and beautiful Bruno Mathsson chairs. Gunta Stozl wove a similar style of chair in collaboration with Marcel Breuer in 1921, and there are some wonderful woven Mary Heilmann chairs in the reading room of the Whitechapel you CAN SIT on.

Mathsson

Uglycute

Stolzl/ Breuer

Heilmann

I wanted to create the bands as if there were vertical compositions in their own right, but also to correspond on the horizontal axis too, and also as a whole picture. Unfortunately the process of weaving in this way is a long, slow and fiddely process, and I wish I could have also created within this time, straps separated from one another to try interweaving in the way in the furniture as well as this attached hanging piece.There is a long way to go in investigating this process (as always), but I find it exciting to think of applying the weaving in this way- how you could create interaction between the layers of weaving interlacing each other, and how colour and contrast of pattern and plainness could be used within the structure.

Another aspect I was looking at was the surface texture, the variety between the silk and linen and the heavy silk- resulting in varying surface textures - although similar in colour, the effect of touch and reflection of light is quite contrasting and is something I want to continue looking into.

The various patterns and textures are created using float patterns, which involves using a pick up stick to drop and pick up certain warp ends, as well as the soumak technique I used in previous weaving.

The San Gimignano wallpaper design is now up at new Pizza Express branch at Brent Cross, a site specific design was made for this location, as well as a panel for a glass partition.