In December 2018 I led Luxury Floral Print T-shirts, a two-day digital art and design workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, developed in conjunction with the exhibition Fashioned from Nature.

The V&A described the workshop simply: “Design your own botanical textile pattern inspired by the V&A collections.”

For me, however, the workshop brought together several strands of my practice that had been developing over many years: painting, pattern, digital transformation, textiles, environmental thinking and participatory design.

From Flower to Pattern

Participants began with flowers and botanical imagery, developing these through drawing, composition and digital processes into increasingly complex repeat patterns. The designs were then prepared for digital printing onto T-shirts.

The movement from observation to abstraction was important.

A flower did not need to remain an illustration of a flower. Through selection, repetition, scale, rotation, colour and digital manipulation, an observed form could become a pattern and a pattern could become a material surface.

This was closely related to the way I worked in my own studio.

By 2018, my Drapes installations had already taken painting and digitally constructed pattern into architectural space. Images could move between drawing, screen and cloth; repetition could alter their scale; and textiles could allow colour and pattern to leave the conventional picture plane and occupy a building.

The V&A workshop translated some of those processes into a form other people could enter and use for themselves.

Making Knowledge Public

Teaching at the V&A was never entirely separate from making art.

I have often thought of workshops as spaces in which processes normally hidden within an artist’s studio can become public. Participants encounter not only a finished image but the decisions through which images are constructed: looking, selecting, cropping, repeating, transforming, testing and translating from one material or technology into another.

In this sense, participatory design became another form of artistic exchange.

Rather than demonstrating a predetermined aesthetic for participants to reproduce, I was interested in giving people tools through which they could develop their own visual language.

The museum collection provided the starting point. Digital technology became a means of transformation. The printed textile became another stage in the life of the image.

Art, Design and the Museum

Looking back, I am also interested in how naturally art and design coexisted in these workshops.

Within my own practice I had never found the boundary between them particularly useful. The processes I used to make a large installation could also generate a textile pattern; methods developed through design could return to painting; an encounter with a museum object could become a drawing, which could become a digital image, which could become cloth.

The categories changed while the process continued.

The V&A was a particularly appropriate place for this way of working because its collections continually place fine art, design, craft, fashion, technology and material history in conversation with one another.

My workshops inhabited that same territory.

Fashioned from Nature

The context of Fashioned from Nature added another dimension.

Questions about flowers, textiles and fashion could not be separated entirely from questions about materials, production and our relationship with the natural world.

These were already familiar questions within my work. My earlier research into plastics had considered material longevity, waste and attachment; Billboard Skirts had transformed discarded polythene and second-hand clothing; and my continuing movement between painting and textiles had made me increasingly conscious of where materials come from, how they are transformed and what happens to them afterwards.

Here those questions entered a participatory setting.

The workshop allowed environmental thinking to sit alongside pleasure, colour, fashion and visual invention rather than treating sustainability as a separate aesthetic category.

A Continuing Method

I can now see this V&A workshop as part of a methodology that recurs throughout my practice:

look → draw → transform → repeat → materialise → encounter again

The outcome might be a painting, a piece of cloth, an animation, an installation or, in this case, a printed T-shirt.

What interests me is the movement between them.

An image does not necessarily reach a final state. It can migrate between technologies, scales and materials, acquiring something from each encounter.

That principle continues to inform the way I work now.

V&A Workshop

Luxury Floral Print T-shirts
Led by Emma Neuberg
Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London
1 & 8 December 2018

Two-day workshop exploring botanical imagery, digital composition and textile pattern, presented in conjunction with the V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature.

The V&A described the workshop as an opportunity to use favourite flowers as inspiration while learning digital processes to create compositions that would subsequently be digitally printed onto T-shirts.

Further information: V&A — Luxury Floral Print T-shirts

Photo credit: C. Schek