Blog Post: Katie Schwab

In the studio at SPACE I’m currently researching early and midcentury production and use of textiles, specifically related to architecture, interiors and garment design. I’ve been looking at London Underground moquette, postwar tiled murals, printed textiles from the Cryséde factory in St Ives and Hans Tisdall’s woven murals for Plymouth’s Council House.

This research feeds into two projects launching this month; an exhibition opening at The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art and a limited edition publication for commuters produced with Liam Allan for the NYC subway.

The following quotes accompany this research, reflecting on the relationships between abstraction, materials, production and function.

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Can we see what it is?

Yes. Palm trees. A little house.

There’s a lot of different types of colours in that.

A river.

There’s footprints.

There’s one with flower fields. This isn’t the flower fields, is it?

It looks like a boat. A little boat. You can read lots of things into these. It looks like a ploughed field, too. It’s almost like a Cornish landscape but with sea colours. ^[1]

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The area of the seat that would get most wear was the bit more or less in front and the bit where you rub your back on the back, so that one wanted to keep something fairly all over, with good contrasting pattern, that wasn’t restless.^[2]

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The pillars that go round the outside of the building are covered with Murano glass from Venice, which was fitted by Italian craftsmen… this is Sicilian marble, the white marble… and this is local Ashburton marble, the same as they’ve done in the Guildhall.^[3]

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^[1] Conversation with Victoria Hughes- Crosnier, Janet Axton and Maggie Davis, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, 2018.

^[2] Enid Marx: Designing fabrics for the London Passenger Travel Board in the 1930s. Interview between Cynthia Weaver and Enid Marx, 1986 [published in Weaver’s Enid Marx: Designing Fabrics for the London Passenger Transport Board in the 1930s, Journal of Design History, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1 January 1989].

^[3] Steve Mallinson, guided tour of the Council House, Plymouth, 2018.