NATURAL HABITAT From earth to canvas with Hildur Bjarnadóttir
My first meeting with Hildur Bjarnadóttir was at my home in Selfoss, South Iceland, where we met for an interview about her work. Hildur showed me a lovely thick book aptly named Colors of Belonging, chronicling her work. Here was something thoroughly
new, yet very down to earth, complex and simple, something that would definitely require a more thorough investigation.
The following week, I drove to Hildur’s property, Þúfugarður, a two hectare parcel of land in the middle of nowhere with nary a tree in sight. The name translates to ‘bumpy garden’ and aptly describes the grassy, hillock-laden land that is commonly seen in this part of the country. In the distance, no less than three volcanoes are visible through the clouds on the horizon, including the notorious Eyjafjallajökull volcano that caused so much disruption in 2010. From this vantage point it must have been quite the spectacle to witness a live eruption pumping millions of metric tonnes of volcanic material into the sky for months on end. How, one wonders, did the ecosystem that carpets the land at Þúfugarður react to this onslaught of fine ash raining down upon it?
Hildur and her boyfriend bought the land from a local farmer and built a little house and studio on
the property. While they both grew up in large metropolises such as Dundee, London and later Reykjavik, for Hildur there is no looking back. ‘I wanted land where I could build on my own terms. Everything I want and need is here. In my art I work with plants and the idea of belonging, so for me to move closer to nature has made perfect sense in so many ways,’ Hildur explains.
Now at age 48, her wanderlust tamed, Hildur is firmly rooted to the land where she is content. Moreover, it is evident that Hildur’s attachment to Þúfugarðar comes through clearly in her art. Indeed, the ever changing sky above Þúfugarðar can be mesmerising and the open spaces give one plenty of time to think and reflect.
Working literally from the ground up, Hildur uses primarily, but not exclusively, the colours that she extracts from the indigenous vegetation that surrounds Þúfugarðar. The list of plants that she has carefully collected and catalogued is as endless as it is poetic – meadowsweet, garden angellica, water avens, dwarf willow, yellow bedstraw, arctic thyme, lady’s m antle, cotton grass, meadow buttercup, horsetail and dandelion are among her main resources for obtaining a wide, yet subtle variety of earth-toned dyes.
Using pure wool and linen fibres imported from Belgium, each strand is dyed with a colour derived from one particular type of plant (or is painted with acrylic paints). Once the process is complete, the yarn is then woven on a loom to create a solid plain or multi-coloured cloth
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synthetic dyes can’t. Reds, pinks, gold, blues and greys are a strong feature and all work well together like the plants they are derived from. Designs are hand screen printed on 100 per cent linen and Nicola does all the production herself to ensure standards are maintained and her concern for the environment is protected.
To test the market she exhibited at craft and furnishing fairs where her fabrics attracted attention from enthusiasts at home and abroad. The work was picked up by Helen Cormack, the force behind Tissus d’Helene, a boutique showroom at Chelsea Harbour, well known for specialising in artisanal fabrics and wallpapers. Stock comes from England, France, Belgium, Italy and America and Helen’s passion for prints is reflected in the hugely diverse ranges – most are hand blocked or hand screen printed.
With Helen as a mentor Nicola was able to tackle design and production issues, and a contemporary wooden studio at her Stamford home in Lincolnshire houses the seven metre print table. Outside a carpet of wildflowers reflects nature at its best and serves as further artistic inspiration. Said Nicola: ‘I draw from the nature that surrounds me. The other day I spotted a piece of ivy struggling to escape from a brick wall and I imagined what it was running away from. When a neighbour’s clematis tumbled over my garden fence I suddenly thought it preferred my garden to theirs, and wondered why.’
Appreciation of the fabrics and the concept 4
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A LIFE IN PATTERN
The Work of Orla Kiely
Orla Kiely has built a brand on a striking simple pattern called Stem. In A Life in Pattern, her latest book published by Conran Octopus, she acknowledges that ‘Stem has been good to us. It has been the land on which the house was built.’ Since its introduction in 2000, Stem has been reinvented every season through colour, scale, texture and many other graphic devices. The result is a library of designs, each different and fresh, yet keeping the same shared DNA.
Receiving her MA from the Royal College of Art in 1992 and soon afterwards setting out on her own with knitted hats commissioned by Harrods, she soon expanded into handbag designs. In 1994 Kiely formed a business partnership with her husband Dermott Rowan and presented accessories at London Fashion Week. Buyers from Japan placed the first orders. Working at her kitchen table while also designing freelance for Marks & Spencer and Debenhams, by 1998 her range included clothing and she showed for the first time at Paris Fashion Week. Goods were soon being shipped to Hong Kong, Ireland, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and a dedicated design studio was created in 1999.
Her bags took off in 2001 and her distinctive patterns now appear on watches, jewellery, shoes, wallpapers and more: not just backpacks but bicycles and tents too. Key early collaborations include the 2004 launch of homeware collections for Sainsbury’s and Heal’s. Later came Habitat, Target and Harlequin, which makes and distributes her wallpapers into stores such as John Lewis.
Sporting Kiely patterns in 2011 were the limited edition Citroën DS3s, and cases for Apple products. Having founded her ready-to-wear line in 2003, Kiely now produces four fashion collections: Spring / Summer, Pre-Fall, Autumn / Winter and Resort. The first L’Orla Resort collection appeared in 2016, co-conceived with her fashion stylist of nearly a decade, Leith Clark. Although informal soundings suggest that homewares – especially those ubiquitous mugs – are most widely known and loved, Kiely’s focus recently has been on her fashion launches. Films produced to accompany her fashion shows since 2011 can be viewed on her website.
Pattern is key. Each design is developed carefully by drawing and refining the essential organic elements that are the foundations of her instinctively satisfying repeating patterns. Nature – rendered more abstract and graphic – is always a core source of pattern ideas. The charm of many Kiely designs is in their whimsical nature. In some cases she surprises us with the rendition of sunglasses on a wallet or a skipping rope on a handbag. Often patterns such as Elephant Maze, Henny Hen and Bonny Bunny are based on bold near-Escher renditions of animals. Pattern, her Conran Octopus book of 2010, details her approach to designing clean lines and graphic shapes, which she stresses are trickier than painterly patterns, being less tolerant of error during the production stages.
Equal attention is paid to the realisation of Kiely’s stores, with shops located in London,
Tokyo, Korea and New York. The store in Covent Garden, opened in 2005, was designed by Gerard Taylor, as were eight stores and concessions across Asia. Stores aside, Kiely product is sold in over 33 countries. Among the 1,000 plus stores she has worked with over the years are Saks 5th Avenue, Le Bon Marché, Selfridges, Fenwicks, Harvey Nichols, Brown Thomas and Anthropologie.
The consistent component behind Kiely’s style is her use of colour. In this regard, she is conscious of her debt to the Irish landscape. Her love for greens from moss to seaweed, the greys and browns of huge skies and rolling hills, the mustard yellow of gorse and the wild flowers on roadside verges, all merged with colourations initially inspired by the fashionable tones of the 1950s and 1960s, now mutated in response to 21st century aesthetics. She developed her colouring skill in a New York design studio, where she worked for a year soon after receiving her first degree in textile design in 1984 from the National College of Art and Design in Dubli. Mixing gouache paints by hand, she learned the subtleties of colour: how to affect the tones, how to make a colour chalky, clean or dirty.
Success has been marked by a series of awards, beginning with the 2001 UK Fashion Export Award for Accessories and the 2008 UK Fashion Export Award for Exporter of the Year. The Dublin-born designer has been called a ‘quiet force’ in the industry and in her own nation was named Woman of the Year by the 4
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PAIR OFF Ace & Jig reveal their true stripes
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COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 48 EIGHT WAYS TO SUNDAY Tanya Goodwin takes a trip round A La Ronde
EVENTS dates for your diary 20 October 2018, Picnic Baskets with Hilary Burns, London, UK 10 November 2018, Covered Buttons & Mark Making with Rachael Howard, London, UK 24 November 2018, Paper Intricacies with Claire Brewster, London, UK 17-24 August, Lora Avedian, Blooming Marvellous, Two and Three Dimensional Fabric Flowers, France 17-24 August, Claire Wellesley-Smith, Slow Stitch, Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art, France 24-31 August, Nicola Cliff of Madder Cutch & Co, Fine Print, Screen Printing with Natural Dyes, France 24-31 August, Carla and Jeremy Bonner, Bag of Tricks, Contemporary Leatherwork, France
83 PRIZES THIS ISSUE Mungo Boma Kitchen cloth for the first one hundered three-year subscribers mungo.co.za Nicola Cliffe original hand-printed quilts. worth £290 maddercutchandco.com Pansy underwear collection of your choice worth £300 pansy.co Kate's recent book, West Highland Way, a gift bag containing 12 skeins of Milarrochy Tweed yarn and a hand-crafted snood worth £300 katedaviesdesigns.com
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Scrolling through the Instagram feed of Ace & Jig, you’d be forgiven for mistaking Jenna Wilson and Cary Vaughn, the designers behind the label, for extremely glamorous cult leaders. It’s not that the many women pictured wearing their clothes are identikit: on the contrary, they all look achingly cool and charismatic in their own ways; but their clothes do all appear to come from the same distinctive pair of hands – perhaps those of a cult matriarch.
Simple in cut, each garment works like a jigsaw piece. Designed to be worn in multiple combinations, it’s as though any ensemble of Ace & Jig’s pieces would fit together to make a thoughtful outfit. It’s the fabrics, however, that really make these clothes stand out.
All woven, rich in colour and more often than not featuring a signature stripe; textiles like these are usually only seen when looking to textile traditions of the past; where communities really would all be dressed by a few skilled hands and designed out of practicality, tradition and culture rather than passing trends. Ace & Jig’s designs feel cool, useful and special in equal measure.
When the label launched in 2009 not many brands were making their own fabrics. ‘Sure, many were making their own printed cloth, but not yarn-dyed woven fabric. The standard at the time was creating a full-blown collection with knits, wovens, denim, shoes, bags etc. The only designers that were doing one thing at the time were those focused on denim. We were like: Why can’t we do this with woven fabric?’ But why go to all of the trouble of making your own fabric, yet confine yourself to woven textiles? ‘If we were going to create something new in this world we wanted it to be thoughtful yet recognisable, so we started with the fabric; woven yarn dye stripes! Plus, we are expansive creatives at heart and needed some sort of grounding structure to fall back on.’
All of Ace & Jig’s fabrics are woven in India from natural fibres – ?
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INFORM the latest news, reviews and exhibition listings
05 BIAS /CONTRIBUTORS A letter from the founder, Polly Leonard and comments from our contributors 07 NEWS London Design Biennale, Pansy, Erica Tanov, Audrey Walker at the Ruthin, Carl Hansen 84 READ Wool: Unravelling an American Story of Artisans and Innovation by Peggy Hart, Schiffer Publishing 2017
reviewed by Joanne Ingersoll Christopher Dresser Textiles Harry Lyons. ACC Art Books reviewed by Uthra Rajgopal 86 VIEW Dentelle – Designer Lace, Cite Dentelle Mode, Calais, pre-viewed by Nicola Donovan. Beadwork Adorns the World Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, reviewed by Marsha C. Bol. Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier,
Design Museum, London, reviewed by Jane Audas Four Corners of One Cloth: Textiles from the Islamic World Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester by Lesley Mitchison 95 COMING NEXT The East issue: In search of stars 96 SWATCH NO 44 Favourite Fabric: Corduroy by Sarah Jane Downing illustrated by Rosie Gainsborough
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