Paint! Pattern! Print! exhibition at The Fashion and Textile Museum

Earlier in the year I came across information about the exhibition Paint! Pattern! Print! The Textiles of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, possibly via a Time Out listing, and bookmarked it for a possible visit.

The exhibition describes itself as:

Step into the exuberant world of pioneering designers Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, from painted beginnings to bold textiles, fashion and homeware designs.

I’d never been to the Fashion and Textile Museum before, so that was interesting in its own right. I didn’t know anything about Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell before spotting the listing, but the imagery on the museum page jumped out at me straight away, their patterns and colours felt very much up my street, and that was enough to decide I wanted to go.

It was pleasantly busy, alive enough for a bit of atmosphere but never crowded. It’s a lovely building with a good amount of exhibition space. It’s exhibition-led rather than home to permanent collections, which reminded me a little of Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, another place that curates around one major show at a time and builds outward from it. I spotted a poster for workshops tied into Paint! Pattern! Print!, the same kind of thing Ditchling does well. The secondary show here was a collection of pincushions made by soldiers on active service. It’s quite moving, some of the pincushions carry photos of the person who made them, and in some cases that would have been the last image a mother ever received of her son. It was genuinely interesting, and there was something fun about the collection itself too. The info panel explained that these simple, kit-made cushions need no real skill or creative eye to produce, which may be exactly why collectors and curators overlooked them for so long, until two private collectors became captivated by them.

But I was there for Paint! Pattern! Print!, which covered two floors and was a proper riot of colour throughout. One of the highlights for me was the reproduction of their studio, fascinating and just as colourful as everything else on show.

The timeline upstairs was useful for getting a proper sense of what happened when across their working life together, though it was impossible to photograph in any meaningful way, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Upstairs in the studio space there’s a film showing Sarah Campbell painting flowers onto fabric in a simple but effective manner, clearly showing her skill and talent, and then also working with paper and card, some of which are on show too. The film was charming, and her process looks peaceful.

A few other favourites from the visit:

A headscarf, above, and the felt-tip design that was the original artwork for it.

This is a four-colour print, and yet it feels so much richer than that.

I loved all the patterns here, right up my street.

And a clock crafted from colourful threads.

I came away thoroughly charmed by both the exhibition and the museum, and I’d happily go back.