KATHLEEN MULLANIFF : TRACES

11 January – 7 March 2004
The Room Upstairs, Christchurch Mansion

This exhibition aimed to highlight the way in which an artist can make the most beautiful work in the grandest manner inspired by an artefact that is understated and discreet.

Interiors is a series of paintings, produced over a period of 8 eight years and inspired by a small sample of 18th century block printing.

We wanted Kathleen’s work to excite the viewer towards looking at the world around us in new ways. This exhibition was very relevant to Christchurch Mansion, which is full of the intriguing, the understated and the important. It is the way in which we see and interpret objects around us that sparkles and fires the imagination.

Kathleen trained at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and Goldsmiths College, University of London.

She has exhibited in Painting as a Foreign Language at Cultura Inglesa Sao Paulo. Fabric Reinterpreting the House at Abbott Hall Art Gallery. Loop at Bankfield Museum, Showhouse: at PM Gallery and House. Kathleen is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University.

Textiles with printed patterns grew increasingly popular for clothing and furnishings in Britain from the middle of the 18th century. The range and quality available to customers was constantly widening through innovations and refinements in production methods for the spinning and weaving of cotton thread, which improved the quality of English cotton available to the textile printers. Fine and easily draped fabric was well suited to the softer, less structured style of women's dress developing in the 1780s.

Wood blocks were used to print multi-coloured dress and furnishing fabrics. For this example the colours were built up with a series of blocks carrying madder dye with different mordants (substances which fixed the dye) to produce the shades required. Blue and green (blue over yellow) were added by painting or 'pencilling' indigo onto the fabric with a brush.

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