Recollected Patterns: The botany of Walter Hill opens on 8 October 2012 at the Redland Art Gallery, Capalaba. Last week I focused on finalising the new works which will accompany the original 2011 exhibition hang.
All artworks in the original exhibition, Collected Patterns: The botany of Walter Hill were in black and white. That’s right, every last one. Since then, I have continued to develop designs from the giclée print series in new colourways and some of these will feature in Recollected Patterns.
I’m edging my way through the process of sampling with new suppliers. Of course, the new giclée prints will be printed through Brisbane Digital Images by my expert printer, Martin Barry. However, I am exploring digital printing for my new wallpaper and textile designs with two new suppliers, one in Australia and one in the United States. This poses interesting challenges in colour matching and slows down the process of development as I need to receive one set of samples from one supplier to provide to the next supplier to colour match. What I do first and with whom is reliant on each company’s approach to colour technology. The company in the USA, for example, prints from RGB Hex files and won’t colour match to Pantone or other colour swatches. This means I commence development with them and need to get the work where I want it at this point. From there, I will send their samples to the Australian company to print my wallpaper as they will colour match from supplied fabric swatches. The giclée prints I can adjust and tweak back to the fabric as I have developed a moderate range of my own colour swatches on the Hahnemühle paper stock we use for printing.
So, the fun begins as I order my overseas fabric samples, request express postage back to Australia and trust I have allowed enough space in my timeline to buffer any changes and resampling!