Exhibition - Unit 2 Gallery 59 - 63 Whitechapel High St E1 7PF

As part of London Design Week I will be showing at the Unit 2 Gallery from Monday 21st September until Friday October 2nd. Very exciting! I have a much larger space than for my MA show so have spread out my work a bit. The lengths work so much better in this space and the light, it being a proper gallery space, is perfect for them. You can actually see all the detail. I have also placed on a plinth a book of some of my research and colourways as this is really quite an integral part of how I work. Its nice to see the correlation.

www.unit2.co.uk

a photo taken by my friend saurabh of my work

I couldn't resist adding this because it is a far better photograph than i could ever take and you can almost see the design on the two paler fabrics. god they are so difficult to photograph!

Brand spanking new business cards

MA design suite summer show

For the final show I displayed some longer lengths and took down some of the graphics as advised by my tutors because they felt that the way I'd displayed it was too busy. I sweated my heart out to get them up in time. Very stressful but am glad its all up and finished. The show is on at Central House which is by Aldgate East tube opposite the Whitechapel Gallery until Monday 13th September from 10-6.

Final show ..... my little exhibition

some colourways

'collider' the fabric that i struggled to make!

everything went wrong with this fabric design. EVERYTHING!

I started off trying out diagrams like the one below only for photoshop to crash on me so that i couldn't save the image. i spent ages trying to use grab to capture an image of it but nothing that crashed too (i think the file was just too large i'd started off at 300dpi and 100cm by 100cm but as i needed more room to get all the shape in i'd enlarged it and the mac i was working on turned round and hated me for it). So having spent ages trying to get this drawing right I was about to lose it. So here is a photo I took on my digital camera. I uploaded this photo into photoshop and thought I could just select the black pixels and start again. but of course the pixels were not all black and the image was hugely distorted.
This proved to be much of the designs saving grace in the end. The background was no longer white but was a mix of grey pixels so whatever I did with the main image there would always be this slubby background. As I'd struggled with the background of the 'quark' fabric being too flat here the mix of pixels automatically gave a kind of texture to the design and if you look closely there is almost an imprint or watermark of grey diamonds across the back of the design.

The next problem with the design was that it became a bit laboured in my eyes as the layering and repeat became quite complex.
I liked the individual elements but was not sure that as a composition the design worked. And the repeat was too brick like and didn't flow. Not sure what to do and my brain completely blocked I took elements and created the simpler 'jet fragmentation' and 'x dependence' fabrics also shown on this blog.
I kept mulling it over this design trying to think how I could isolate the elements that i liked without having this over complicated composition. It was a simple answer really. i put them in circles! I have printed the circles on a large and small scale. The large I think works best. The small circles I have used to make a lampshade which I have used for my show exhibition. But I'm kind of a fan of the large blobby circles.

jet fragmentation and x dependence

Two more fabrics using particle physics images. These I have called 'jet fragmentation' and 'x dependence'. They are much simpler than the 'quark' fabric and came out of a more complex green layer fabric that i will post about later which i called 'collider'. Anyhow below are the starting images leading to the final fabrics. They are printed upon silk and are very delicate looking. They have been printed digitally using acid dyes which can be really strong and bright so I adjusted the saturation of the files before sending them to print. The result was a really beautiful soft tone which is far paler than I have used in the images below. Once I have the fabrics back (they are currently being assessed) I will scan them in and post. But I am very pleased with the outcome.

A few colour way ideas for the 'quark' fabric

Final major project

For my major project I wanted to make fabrics that used unusual elements as the starting point. Having met a lovely young lady Ellie Dobson at a mutual friends party, I discovered that she worked for CERN (the large hydrongen collider project in Geneva) and interested in seeing how she worked as a particle physicist met up with her in Oxford where she was finishing her PHD to talk more about her work. She showed me beautiful photographs and computer generated images that they used to plot and predict how the atoms would react on collision. She also introduced me to particle physics theory and I found the graphs and diagrams that they used strangely beautiful. It was these that I used as the starting points of my ideas. Below is the starting drawing for a fabric I am calling 'quark'. I rotated and layered the diagram, filling in the gaps with colours and building up the background. I then used this fabric to upholster a much loved chair to give it a new lease of life.