LONDON.- Enter an immersive world of colour, nature and exuberant creativity in Paint! Pattern! Print!, an exhibition that traces the work of sisters Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, who revolutionised textile design in the 1960s and led the market for over five decades. This exhibition showcases their prolific and diverse output through a vast range of colourful and joyous designs, large-scale paintings, room sets, fashion and interiors.
Immediately recognisable and influential, the Collier Campbell style was bold, loose, painterly and free-flowing. Visibly hand-created though mass-produced, their innovative patterns transformed printed fabric and the world of interiors. Paint! Pattern! Print! tells their success story, from childhood and family influences to a series of highly prestigious partnerships that brought British design to a global audience.
In 1961, the young Susan Collier boldly approached Liberty of London with her portfolio, and Liberty bought six of her designs. As commissions increased, her sister Sarah Campbell helped out, painting and inventing patterns herself, and later becoming retained by Liberty as a textile designer. The sisters determined to design patterns for people of their generation and their style epitomised a new post-war zest for life – a life that was colourful, carefree and modern. In 1979 they transformed their partnership into a limited company, the original, Collier Campbell Ltd.
They went on to work on a vast range of diverse projects until Susan’s death in 2011. Sarah Campbell continues to design and develop her practice and the upstairs galleries will focus on her work from 2011 to the present day.
Experimental and innovative from the start, the sisters refused to accept the conventions of the traditional pattern repeat, intentionally ‘cheating the repeat’, as they called it, in their desire to maximise the fluidity of the designs. Their skill was to translate an original painting into a repeating pattern that appeared continuous and expansive rather than obviously repeating. Remarkably, they made repeats work on a massive scale, allowing the designs to flow and grow whilst retaining the feeling of a continuous painting.
‘It has always been our guiding principle that the painted mark gives energy and beauty to fabric.’ – Collier Campbell
Their vibrant patterns were often inspired by nature and the natural world, from plants and flowers to birds and animals, and we see many examples of these in the form of large-scale paintings, designs and textiles in the lower galleries. Narrative painterly landscapes are exemplified in one of their most famous designs, ‘Côte D’Azur’ a painting that looks out of a window onto an imagined French summer vista redolent of Matisse. This evocative landscape of palm trees, balconies and vivid blue skies, quickly became an iconic design that was an immediate success and will be shown as a room set complete with curtains and cushions, wallpaper and rugs. Other landscape-informed works on display include ‘Herbaceous Border’ (1974), inspired by the colourful and abundantly planted border in Christopher Lloyd’s garden at Great Dixter.
In addition to landscapes, delightful organic prints of animals, birds, flowers and insects are displayed in designs such as ‘Birdsong’ (1984) and ‘Cottage Garden’ (1975), whilst abstraction is explored through designs such as those made for the Gatwick North Terminal carpets (1986) and ‘Bauhaus’. This design was commissioned by Blair Pride, the design producer at Liberty of London Prints, in response to the 1968 Bauhaus exhibition at the Royal Academy and was inspired by a Gunta Stölzl tapestry. Originally designed as a silk scarf, ‘Bauhaus’ not only rejuvenated Liberty’s image with its first abstract design but also pioneered a new style of dynamic all-over pattern and the use of contemporary colours.
Fashion as well as interiors came calling when the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent used gypsy folk-inspired designs by Collier Campbell as the inspiration for his first ever off-the-peg collection, the 1972 ready-to-wear ‘Rive Gauche’ collection. Two years later, British designer Bill Gibb included Susan and Sarah’s loosely painted stripe design ‘Quickstep’ (1974), printed on Mercury Satin, in his summer collection. Throughout the exhibition dresses, silk jackets, flowing skirts, trousers, dressing gowns and shirts will be displayed as well as bags, accessories and scarves including a surprising animal scarf design for Jaeger and a Rodier circular skirt.
From an early stage the pioneering sisters had decided to take total control of their own designs as designer converters responsible for the buying of cloth, screen making, printing and the final delivery of the finished fabric. They wanted to ensure that their work was recognised and linked with their names. At this time, it was a very unusual career path for women to take. ‘We knew that textile designers were often completely overlooked. These were often women, working away, selling their things, never seeing them again, never seeing what happened to them, no control ... We wanted to retain our name, retain our work, retain our power over it.’ - Sarah Campbell.
Partnerships were also an important part of the Collier Campbell success, and in 1974 Terence Conran commissioned the sisters to design for Habitat. Their distinctive patterns became part of Conran’s affordable design vision and the collaboration allowed them to extend the reach of their innovative designs into the high-street.
Original paintings for early Habitat designs will be displayed such as ‘Egyptian Birds’ (1976) and ‘Barge Roses’ (1976), both inspired by folk-art traditions. These mark the start of an extremely fruitful collaboration that lasted more than 15 years, with Conran crediting their designs as playing a significant role in Habitat’s success. Other high profile collaborations included Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Jaeger and the American company Martex whilst Sarah Campbell’s more recent collaborations have included working with Anthropologie and West Elm on ceramics and tableware.
Domestic, still life and folk art were always important influences, and the sisters’ homes and studios were crowded with craft objects from local junk shops - pottery, textiles, embroideries, carpets, appliqués and lace. Elements of their everyday lives naturally filtered into their designs, as ceramics, jugs and personal objects they had collected or been given became recurrent motifs. Constantly seeking new inspiration, they were also eager to explore themes drawn from other cultures. The design ‘Paysanne’ (1990) features a German decorative box that once belonged to Susan’s grandmother-in-law, whilst ‘Gypsy Dance’ (1990) looked to Eastern European folk traditions and was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Sarah’s home and studio remain a rich source of inspiration and her studio will be partially recreated for the exhibition.
In the upstairs galleries we see the continuation of Sarah Campbell’s creative journey in work that reflects her love of painting, pattern and colour. Commitment to painting remains at the core of her studio practice, and she has broadened her practice to include hand-painting directly onto the cloth itself, allowing her total control over the placing of colour and pattern in relation to form and function. Collaboration also remains central to her work; most recently she partnered with Liberty of London to celebrate its 150th anniversary, licensing ‘Cottage Garden’, a design she originally created for Liberty in the 1970s.
‘Primarily I love to paint: to have control over the application of colour and form and to build a pattern or surface with confidence.’ - Sarah Campbell
Through recreated studio spaces, room sets, vast paintings, detailed designs, beautiful fabrics and material from the Collier Campbell shop and archive, the exhibition tells the story of two sisters who shared the same vision, the same artistic language and the same passion for colour, painting and textiles. Over many decades, Collier Campbell produced an extraordinary range of exuberant, colourful and painterly patterns that challenged the strictures of the repeat and embodied the energy of the hand-painted mark.
‘Colour does enhance lives, I think, in a very big way. Fabric and pattern have such a lot of emotion attached to them.’ - Sarah Campbell
