Surface Design 2018

We're off to Surface Design at the Business Design Centre in Islington today.  We have three new wallpapers under development so will be meeting with various collaborators at the show to discuss these and other exciting plans we have.  It's always good to see developments in the surfacing world and where our new products might find their place market.  Wish list is to work with Kit Kemp of Firmdale Hotels who, among others has worked with A Rum Fellow who we admire greatly.

Below you can see a sneak preview of our 'My Country - Yellow' available soon.  

Joycie Pitjara Morton painting, selected on a trip to Australia a year ago, translated into a stunning wallpaper.  Joycie will receive money for the sale of each roll her designs appear on.

Sacred Garden of Eden rock hole - Kings Canyon

When we were young my parents flew a small aircraft around the Australian outback.  These were the days where you could land next to Uluru and crawl all over it allowing you to experience its awesome spiritual power.  Another sacred site we clambered all over was Kings Canyon.  The worlds largest monolith and one its most ancient canyons were formed at the same time the first life forms developed on earth - around 600 million years ago.  

Kings Canyon, covered with a plethora of fossil imprints was one of the most emotionally powerful places we'd ever encountered.  This ancient canyon reminded us how insignificant we are in the big scheme of things (although 35 years on we have the power to destroy it all - after a five year fight in June this year the traditional owners learnt the mining threat, including fracking had finally been nullified).  

While exploring Kings Canyon we came across this watering hole spending a significant part of the day enjoying its cool waters.  As Watarrka National Park, where Kings Canyon sits, has been given back to its traditional owners you can no longer swim in it.  It's now identified as a sacred men's site. We felt slightly heartbroken we couldn't share the same experience of swimming in it with our children.  Much of what we accessed all those years ago is no longer open to us in the way it was.  It gave us the slightest insight into what it must have been like to to torn from your land unable to share it's beauty and spirit with younger generations.

Rock hole found in the Garden of Eden, Kings Canyon, Australia

Kings Canyon walls above the Garden of Eden.

The colours of Australia

Detail of local flora from a vibrant painting by Colleen Ngwarraye Morton, 'Women's Ceremony and Bush Medicine' – sold through our ART page & in our Tetbury gallery.

“I feel with my body. Feeling all these trees, all this country. When this blow you can feel it. Same for country... you feel it, you can look, but feeling... that make you.”

– Big Bill Neidjie, Gagudju Elder, Kakadu.

The origins of our art gallery, and now our art-driven interiors collection, is a long-standing personal and professional connection with Central Desert artists. Theirs is an arid land with extensive dry seasons, which is the birthplace of what is sometimes called 'Aboriginal desert painting,' at the forefront of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement.

"The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible."

Henri Matisse, from "Notes of a Painter"

Within the indigenous Australian cultures and traditions, the artist holds a sacred individual freedom to engage with their own Dreamtime and connection with country, to express a facet of life through a personal choice of brushstroke and form and colour – all the while anchored within the inherited horizon of a collective dream. The use of colours in the contemporary aboriginal art paintings reflect not only the Australian landscape but the world of their imagination, which encompasses past, present and future.

Another detail of local flora from a vibrant painting by Colleen Ngwarraye Morton, 'Women's Ceremony and Bush Medicine' – sold through our ART page & in our Tetbury gallery.

Alice Springs lies at the heart of this region, between the dramatic MacDonnell Ranges and the Todd River. It has historically been a place "crucial to the development of art and as a meeting place, place of exchange and part-time residence for people from the hundreds of Aboriginal communities throughout the central, northern, southern and western regions."* The resilient spirit of its communities, the role they play in political & cultural movements remains very much alive, notably with the iconic annual Desert Mob Art fair.

Throughout, the work of the indigenous artists we represent is a reflection of their personal engagement with a historical and deep spiritual affinity to the land, which they tell and re-tell through art to old and new audiences, layering creation myth upon botanical record, wisdom upon experience, colour upon colour.

Intrepid Alexandra on her current sourcing trip, criss-crossing the Australian Central Desert...

*quote from McCulloch's very excellent Contemporary Aboriginal Art: The Complete Guide.