Lecture on Friday 27th Feb at 1:30pm.
Tracy Kendall works mainly with surface design ideas. She works with silk screen, wallpaper, screen printing (Which is prominant in her work) and furniture etc.
Some of the influences she mentioned in her talk, were random conversations she sometimes hears, the fashion industry, old photographs, the random marks you see on pavements and the colours and shapes that occur when you stack books and magazines on top of eachother. All these influences really did appeal to me as i am very much into pattern and surface design.
The first designs she showed us, were wall designs for her own kitchen. She used just 1 set of cutlery, and screen printed the images to produce this large scale, in your face, knife fork and spoon. I really like this technique, and its such a simple idea. She explained to us all that she felt that at that time, the current wallpaper designs that she was attracted to in the industry were too expensive and so thought she'd take up a bit of D.I.Y!
It isn't just wallpaper she works with though, Tracy showed us some examples of her different types of works including forks on lampshades, a feather off the street blown up and screen printed onto a wall, she would go out and pick 100 stems of grass and find one that she was most drawn to the composition of the stem, blow it up and paste it onto her bedroom wall - the way i look at it, it is a very organic and simple way to make a room look interesting and also personal.
When tracy was explaining her techniques for art galleries, she touched on the fact that she likes people to touch her work, to get involved with them. She had different pieces of wallpaper hanging down from the ceiling with 104 christmas trees hanging amoungst them. The trees helped to guide the people around, they were immediately hit by the s
mell. Tracy wanted to build a fun atmosphere for her audience. It's something different, and memorable.
One fact that Tracy mentioned was that she used black and white a lot in her for, mainly for the purpose to attract male architects etc - the reason being, they're the ones with the money! I like how she explained parts of the industry to us, helping us to understand what she actually went through to get where she is today.
Text is one design Tracy uses to represent pattern. In this particular pattern (Left) i am drawn to the hand written design as it looks fresh and original, she has type wallpaper in her bathroom compared to the usual aqua or green tiles in a bathroom. It is just things like that which makes me like the kind of designer she is, i'd like to buy her house! In this particular picture i have provided, the text is actually stitched onto the wallpaper. The content is a Shakespeare text which is Mid Summer Nights Dream, stitched in her sisters handwriting due to the fact that when Tracy was growing up she was in awe of her sisters handwriting. The reason why Tracy had the piece stitched was because when you glance at a piece of work you think you know what you are seeing, but then when you get up close to the work and touch it, you get the surprise of a rough material poking through some wallpaper. It is a surprise, another fun approach from Kendalls work.
Another technique that Kendall uses is to cover a surface with a different material, such as sequins, buttons and even jigsaw pieces. She used sequins mainly because of the influence of fashion, and Betsy Johnson. She hand stitches sequins onto wallpaper for that sparkle effect (Sharovsky crystals influence). One piece of work she showed us on a slide was a whole wall covered in black sequins - it's simple yet so effective, i could imagine the atmosphere it would prodece when you walked into the room, the idea is so lovely. She doesn't just limit the sequin design just to the wall, she has sewn sequins to dresses inspired by fashion, and chairs inspired by interios design. she had sewn 9,000 sequins and buttons to a chair which took her 1 week to complete, and another chair covered in jigsaw pieces - this idea i really liked due to the random colours and shapes being brought together to live on a piece of furniture. It is all mass produced by hand - keeping that organic feel to them.
Most of Kendalls public work relies on good egitorials in books and magazines. she uses it to validate her work for clients, it is a chance to show the positive that the same piece of work, works in different ways - in any way the client wants really.
Another piece of work which really caught my eye was a piece of lace that Tracy had found at a French flee market which she only paid 3 Euro's for. She had bought it, not designed the lace and yet, she used it in a piece of work, a design for the wall and it earnt her £40,000 - £50,000. This is a massive profit, and quite unbelievable. At first, i was thinking it was an easy cheat to go about designing things in that way, and in a way i still do think that, but at the end of the day why not? If at the end result she has produced a nice design journeyed from the original(Right), why not sell her developed designs and make moeny from it?!
Overall, Tracy Kendall is one of my favourite lectures so far, mainly due to her surface patterns and simplistic ideas which she works to her favour. I liked how she would talk about her progress in the industry, and how she approached the industry giving us tips and how certain techniques would work in our favour. She was very down to earth, and a very experienced woman who i have a lot of respect for. Her work is inspiring and one day i would like to try and use some of her work as inspiration for the production of my own work.
These two pictures represent 'Parthenocarp', I couldn't find a full version of the actual painting, and I got these images off the Manchester art gallery website. It really is absolutely massive, and I think that is what I like about it along with it's style also. I feel that the style of his paintings really draw me in, they make me want to go closer and look at the detail. They are very striking. 
