I was commissioned by The Spring Arts and Heritage Centre to create a body of work to exhibit for their annual Creative Intervention Brief 2023.

The idea began while I was studying for an Art and Design MA in 2019. I had been researching my own creative history through old family photos, tracing my love of colour and pattern back to fond memories as a child spent at home with my mother, using paper sewing patterns and pretty patterned fabrics to make clothes together.

Coincidentally, also in 2019, on hearing that the Butterick Pattern Factory in Havant was to be demolished and redeveloped, I felt an unexpected pang of grief that connected immediately to the loss of my mother, years before. I realised that my creative interest in colour and pattern was somehow deeply connected to, and rooted in, our shared experience of making clothes and homewares and crafting together. It was this feeling, and a distant memory of visiting the 1950’s modernist factory in Havant to buy a sewing pattern, that prompted me to request access to the factory to make a photographic record, with a view to creating a pattern collection.

Creating this exhibition allowed me a very personal opportunity to explore my interest in the medium of pattern, both as a narrative tool and as a template from which to create. It acknowledges and celebrates how place and heritage can inform individual and community creative practice. It connects me to my roots in the Havant area and memories of learning with, and from, other creative makers and teachers in the wider Havant community.

The exhibition is a visual, creative interpretation of the empty factory as I found it during that visit in 2019. Using the medium of repeat pattern, I have interpreted elements from my own photographs, taken at the time of my visit, to form repeating motifs in a series of twelve textile prints, displayed on yardage of 100% organic poplin dressmaking fabric.

Do drop in and take a look – as well as the exhibition there is a warm welcome, a theatre, cinema, museum, little café and small gift shop at The Spring :))

I am so grateful to the staff at The Spring for seeing the potential in my project and for their wonderful support throughout.

If you would like to license these designs, please get in touch

Exhibition photos: Andrew Perris / Photography Firm