Victoria and Albert Museum

Painting in Motion: Colour, Animation and the V&A

My relationship with animation began long before I thought of it as digital practice.

In 1992, I spent time in Prague with the creative team around Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Švankmajer. Back in London during the 1990s, I made small animations by hand at the Film-makers’ Co-op in Primrose Hill, moving pieces of paper frame by frame.

Nearly twenty years later, those experiments resurfaced in a very different form at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

By then paper had become pixels. Photoshop and Illustrator had entered my studio and paintings that had previously existed as fixed arrangements of colour could move.

In January 2015, Alex Flowers of the V&A’s Digital Programmes team invited me to lead the first pilot session of the museum’s Samsung Digital Classroom. Writing about the workshop for the V&A, he illustrated the programme with three of my animated works…

A Plastic Story: An Intimate Look at the Artist–Material Relationship

My relationship with plastic began long before I started thinking about it primarily as an environmental material.

As an undergraduate studying 3D Design at Brighton University, I specialised in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics. From 1991 onwards I became particularly interested in plastic and in what happened when a material associated with industry, mass production and inexpensive objects was treated with the attention normally afforded to more precious materials.

I wanted, in a sense, to luxuriate plastic.

I cast it, coloured it, layered it and experimented with its transparency, surface and capacity to hold an image. For my degree show in 1993 I made a group of six polyester-resin sculptures titled Angels. One subsequently entered the FKP Art Collection in Athens.

Plastic was already becoming more than a material I happened to use. It was becoming a way of…

Drawing with the Museum: Glass, Pattern and the V&A

One of my favourite workshops at the V&A took place in the Clore Gallery as part of Design the World, a programme inviting children and their carers to use the Museum’s collections as starting points for their own designs.

For this session, we began in the V&A’s Glass Gallery.

Rather than simply looking at the objects as historical artefacts, I encouraged participants to notice what glass does: how light passes through it, how forms distort, how reflections multiply and how colour and shadow alter according to the position of the viewer.

Back in the Clore Gallery, these observations became drawings made on Samsung tablets using Autodesk SketchBook. Lines could be repeated, reflected and reorganised into new digital patterns, allowing an encounter with an historical object to become the starting point for an entirely contemporary image.

Looking as making…

Fashioned from Nature: Pattern, Participation and the V&A

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.

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…

At Friday Lates

In November 2015, Melanie Bowles and I returned to the Victoria and Albert Museum with The People’s Print to present a participatory design workshop for the museum’s Friday Late programme, alongside its major exhibition The Fabric of India.

Working with designs by our collaborator Nasima Rumi Begum, we invited visitors to create their own textile compositions using cut-out imagery and heat-transfer printing. Participants selected and arranged elements from Nasima’s collaged drawings before heat-pressing their designs onto tote bags, creating individual objects to take home.

It was an extraordinary evening. The museum was packed with visitors and our workshop attracted a continuous stream of enthusiastic participants. There was a wonderful energy in the room as people experimented with colour, composition and pattern, discovering how quickly a simple arrangement of shapes could become something personal.

This was precisely what Melanie and I had set out to achieve with The People’s Print: to make design accessible through participation, bringing together artistic expertise, digital and traditional processes, and the creative contributions of the public…

Running Postmodernism at the V&A

In autumn 2011, Melanie Bowles and I launched Born to Be Wild, an experimental textile design workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, alongside the exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. Working through our newly established enterprise, The People’s Print, we invited participants to explore the visual language of Postmodernism and collectively create a digitally printed silk swatchbook.

The project brought together nine participants who began as strangers and became collaborators. Through drawing, collage, digital design, discussion and voting, they developed a shared collection of patterns that belonged to the group. The resulting Born to Be Wild Swatchbook was both a beautiful material object and an experiment in collective authorship: a way of transforming the experience of a museum exhibition into something new, personal and enduring…