Frances Lampard

My mother, a textile designer and colourist is probably one of the most important influences in choosing to pursue textile design in my personal project. She has a huge collection of fabrics, and throughout my life I have been surrounded by pattern and colour, because of her. During the late 70’s and 80’s my mother worked for Liberty of London Prints.  Though mostly responsible for designing new colourways for classic Liberty prints, my mother was asked to produce some of her own designs for Liberty scarves and fabrics, in particular a Celtic inspired range of fabrics.

On this page I have selected a few samples from her collection of fabrics that she is likely to have produced colourways for.  However she suffers with early onset Alzheimer's disease, so it was very hard to get her to remember which fabrics she actually worked on and which she remembered in general from the studio at that time.  None the less, she has a very recognisable use of colours, and with a little help from what my father remembered her working on, it became easier to guess at what she may have worked on.  She moves between two distinct styles, a use of naturalistic pastel colours which she used most commonly to re-colour classic Tana Lawn prints, and a love of using flat, bright and bold colours, like the colours of a parrot, which she used more often in Liberty’s more modern abstracted prints of the 1980’s. 

Her work with textiles was the basis of my work this year, so despite the alternate directions our work has taken, it is nevertheless a huge inspiration for me.