New Designers 12: Textile Print

So difficult to choose, ARTS THREAD selects the tip of a talented iceberg of textile print graduates showing at New Designers last week.

From Bucks New University, Jenny Collicott’s beautiful and bold digital prints drew inspiration from David Hockney’s iconic imagery and reflect its playfulness and quirkiness. Created with fashion in mind, her designs would ideally suit garments and accessories such as blouses, skirts or scarves. She is now in the process of creating her own online boutique and already sells her designs overseas under the brand ohGOSH!

Isabel Spurgeon is a graduate from Central Saint Martins and her pure and fragile creations, entitled Time Past Time Present, tells the story of the cycle of life. Inspired by the Japanese aesthetic sensibility of wabi-sabi, it catches a moment, an imperfection that will eventually fade over time. Manmade fabrics are left to naturally decay and then chemically distressed on a screen where the heat creates beautiful textured prints. Her work is poetic and the combination of ceramics, silicone and cotton holds a fleeting yet modern feel.

A graduate from Heriot-Watt University, the watercolours of Chloe Lease’s print collection are strikingly vivid and bold. Painted on a large scale then digitally printed onto natural fabrics, such as linen and heavy weight cotton, the drawings feature the original watermarks, keeping the flowers slightly imperfect, pretty and fresh.

Chrysanthi Katsilouli is a graduate from Glasgow School of Art who studied printed textiles. Her inspiration for this insightful collection was the instinctive process of spatial awareness. Black and white photographs juxtaposed with landscape photographs are the inspiration; they bring an essence of neutralising space. Chrysanthi then enhanced the effect of this black and white research by infusing colour taken from natural space, thereby not being any manmade qualities within her prints.

The processes used were digitally printing onto different weights of silk. This gives a free flowing elegant quality inspired by paper and paint research which explored placement and negative space.

Eve Finlayson, a surface pattern designer and graduate from Leeds College of Art, has created a vibrant and exotic collection for fashion garments and fashion accessories. Her inspiration came from Dutch and Flemish painters who inspired her vivid colours and handcrafted brush strokes. The prints which are digitally printed are first hand painted with acrylic in A2 and then scanned in high resolution and then composed in Photoshop and digitally printed on silk.

Gemma Smith, a print graduate from Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, created an extremely intricate and detailed collection of prints for wallpaper but wishes to experiment with her prints in the future. These eye-catching prints are completely hand drawn with fine liners and adapted for print by blowing up the drawings to reflect a lace effect.

Gemma’s inspiration came from the body’s muscles and how the body works, also using references from controversial anatomist Gunther Von Hagen. Gemma’s free-flowing drawings are her perspective of his pictures and shapes within those pictures. The collection is created by pigment printing with black and white colours which highlights her extreme detailing.

James Bruce, a graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, has created a print collection inspired by his own professional photography and dedicated research through looking at museums and industrial areas. An interest in the planet’s ongoing extinction of species, James has developed impressive illustrations which he has then transferred to screen prints.

The wonderful embroidery with the exquisite handmade sequins using acetate creates a completely unique look of extreme embellishment which contrasts a manmade to an animalistic feel. Even getting a one-off opportunity of having lace made in the last lace-making factory in Scotland, it conveys his passion of going back to basics and having his collection and base fabric all made from scratch; right from the beginning. He hopes to use this collection for menswear fashion.

From Herriot-Watt University, Kym Parker’s original lace drawings initiated from photographs taken in the university’s archive, which she then reproduced onto heavy wools and thick cotton, using a combination of both digital and screen-printing. Adding a feminine and luxurious touch, she hand knitted on a domestic machine before applying dye and print on top. Her embroideries on print also help confer the handcrafted, bohemian feel.