African Printed Cloth

Living in Peckham, I see so much wonderfully colourful and beautifully patterned cloth, worn by the large population of people living in the area with African heritage. They are most commonly worn on Sundays to Church by both women and men.  Historically textiles have played a important role in many African cultures, and it is this that has influenced the development of such unique and vibrant textiles.  What first attracted me to these textiles was the rich colour, but looking more closely I began to notice the pattern design too. The designs often feature ‘conversational’ prints featuring illustrations of objects, often modern ones such as cars or computers.  I decided to research into the culture and try and discover the meaning behind the patterns. 

I found that although there is a great deal of information available about historically traditional African Textiles, there was hardly anything about the textiles I was interested in.  As I found out, this is because these textiles are relatively recent in textile history, only coming into use in the last 100 years.  They were originally designed and produced by English, Dutch, Japanese and Indian companies for the African market, but have always been developed in close connection and consideration of the various cultures of the African countries in which they are sold, and with unique African popular tastes in mind. 

These textiles have probably been inspired by Ghanaian Adinkra cloth, (which is a textile decorated with hand stamped patterns consisting of imagery of deep symbolic meaning and worn as a special type of mourning cloth), but were developed by European textile companies trying to reproduce Indonesian Batiks. 

The textiles take two forms ‘wax Prints’ and ‘fancy Prints’. Wax prints are created by resist dyeing, using pastes (that often do not contain wax at all). The pattern is applied to both sides of the fabric and then dyed, usually using indigo. The paste is treated chemically to create a ‘cracking’ effect most commonly seen in Batik.  Fancy prints are the cheaper of the two fabrics, and are machine printed on one side only, using rotary screens.  Both textiles make use of the same motifs in their pattern design, and both are now also printed in African Textile Factories, though those imported from Holland are much more highly valued.

 The designs on the textiles are inspired by proverbs, which are always either printed along the bottom of the design of or combined into the imagery. The designs do not necessarily illustrate or directly relate to the proverb - they are used as ‘visual entertainment’ - it is the proverb that carries the message. Names are given to designs that are commonly used with particular proverbs, for example:

The proverb ‘mother’s milk is sweet’ is referred to as ‘Breast’ or ‘Cashew’ as this is often the shape of the designs depicted with the proverb;

‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,‘ – ‘eggs’

‘Let’s try to harvest so the hunger does not kill us’ – ‘Eyes’ or ‘Leaves’.

Sayings can also relate to health warnings, the need for education or relationships. Variations on these textiles are worn throughout West, Central and East Africa, worn as the Kanga traditional dress in Kenya, and the Kaba in Ghana.

Becky Earley

Earley is a designer who really thinks about the sustainability of her textiles and how the way in which they are created affects the environment. She is constantly trying out new technology and coming up with new methods of sustainable printing and clothing construction. She is most well known for her use of heat photogram to create patterns, which are then digitally edited and applied to cloth for her garments.  The heat photogram process creates eerie ghostlike silhouettes which created by placing found objects such as pins, feathers, steel mesh and barbed wire on to a pre-painted paper. When made into garments, the textiles give the impression that the objects have been directly transferred onto the clothing, like an x-ray image.

She was also one of the first designers to use fleece (made from recycled plastic bottles) in her fashion designs and also developed an exhaust printing technique that makes use of chemicals caused by classic printing processes, and re-uses them. More recent collections have made use of old clothes; re-cutting them to create a new pieces and adding digitally printed embellishments to them. 

Though much of her work seems more concerned with textile dyeing and fabric construction, her heat photogram work in particular shows her unique sense of placement of pattern on fabrics for clothing.  Her attention to sustainability and re-using materials is also inspirational, and similar to my use of collage to use up waste paper. 

 Exhaust Printing

Basso & Brooke

Basso & Brooke the fashion label run by collaborative team Bruno Basso and Christopher Brooke, is a pioneer in digital textile design. They are most famous for their fashion line but have applied their prints to various different ventures, including bags, scarves, caps and lampshades. They have also begun a furniture range in conjunction with Harrods that features their vibrant prints.  Therefore they are influential to me for not only their inventive use of digital textiles, and its use in their fashion designs, but for their application of pattern to many different products and objects.  It is important to me that pattern design can have multiple uses, and they do this with great success. 

They use their own patented digital printing equipment that prints beautifully on a multitude of different fabrics from leather and wool to silk. Their prints are often wild, brash and clashing digital collages of everything from hand drawn illustrations, historical works of art and photography to found textures and papers. Their designs are often completely covered by these prints, and on both simple cut and complex tailoring. The patterns on their own can often feel very artificial and slightly over the top, but when placed on their designs, they become a wonderfully vibrant, sophisticated and intriguing piece.  Basso & Brooke are also well known for using digital methods to re-create shape and embellishments that would have classically been done by hand.

 More at Basso & Brooke

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.