MEET THE FABRIC DESIGNERS
Posted by Justin Van Breda on Feb 8th 2021
When deciding to create The Fabric Room division of the business, and never having designed fabric before, other than at college, I particularly wanted to work with Artists who created their own work. I wanted to showcase designers and artists who created beautiful and original designs applied to fabric as a canvas.
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When I first walked into the studio or fabric painting warehouse at African Sketchbook and met Di and Chelsea, the mother daughter team at the head of this wonderful hand painted and hand screened fabric enterprise in Cape Town, I was overwhelmed with a sense of community and passionate artistry. I call it ‘Afro- chinoiserie’ and from its micro leopard prints to the larger scaled scenic textiles, this exclusive design house knows how to bring the essence and spirit of Africa onto fabric. Di believes that if you can paint a spiral (I can’t) you can be taught to paint. She employs previously disadvantaged men and women from the Cape Town ghettos and has established around her a vibrant community of designers, weavers and embroiderers whose skill, energy and passion is evident in this exclusive textiles collection.
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Laura Hamilton is a force of nature with a point of view developed from her Jamaican-born roots, edgy London fine art studio and Aristocratic summers in Scotland. She's also a storyteller and that's how her first fabric collection came about. She began to trace the provenance of the vibrantly colourful Jamaican textile designs that she grew up around in the 1960’s and 70’s. Gathering the original fabrics from friends and family around the world and bringing them back to life with new colour-ways, magnified scales and updated repeats, Laura hand screens everything in London on Libeco linen. Design pours out of Laura and her smaller prints called Maligoe, Stacks and Rings are fine art made fabrics.
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She’s a truly English girl inspired by all of Britain’s nature. Whether it be mushrooms, fish, flowers, shells or the treasures found in Victorian cabinets of curiosities, Isabel Kimbell’s designs are full of life. And then she paints them, putting these inspirations and her point of view on fabrics. Her process is the layering of tiny marks and textures on top of one another. Isabel creates designs with character and her exclusive fabric collection is whimsical with depth and texture.
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After earning a fine arts degree at Pratt and studying traditional block prints,John Robshaw journeyed to India searching for natural indigo dye for his paintings. Instead, he fell in love with the fabric-making traditions of the local makers. John Robshaw has persisted through the years finding the most skilled craftspeople to work with to maintain his commitment to producing unique and hand crafted creations. His sharp eye for beauty and originality helped John come upon just the right artisans to bring his designs to life.
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Katharine is a watercolour botanical artist, living in Berkshire, England, and when I was introduced to her by a mutual friend I just knew there was a collection in the making. From working with her incredibly detailed botanical watercolour paintings, collected by the Duchess of Cornwall and the Carnegie, we produced over 140 SKUs in this exclusive fabric collection and printed them in England on linen. It was so exciting to launch in Wiltshire, in the former home of Robert Kime. The collection has been named The Royal Berkshire Collection in homage to her home county; and we tried to give a nod in the naming of the collection to many of the home counties that surround London.
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