The quirks of Australian Flora we could talk about
ad nauseum for the next three weeks, like you
could really throw it out there unlike anything
else. pretty proud of.
I'm not sure whether I can add anything to that.
Um, for slark I'm one half of utopia goods design
studio and manufacturer of textiles and other
furnishing products. The artist hand of the
business, the ongoing mission mission to take
Australian fabrics
to the world. Yeah. I'm Sophie Tetlow. And
together with Bruce we are on a mission to make
Australian native inspired fabrics.
We live in Sydney and so we want to kind of
celebrate that and
we don't want to be status. So we have to dip into
Western Australia. We have to dip into Victoria
being ex mo burnings, but it gets Really, it's
sort of focuses on the beauty of the plant
regardless of where it's from. The other thing is
we wanted to celebrate collar. I mean I've got a
bit of a personal joke life's too short for gray
unless you're short and gray. And you know color
is so wonderful and exciting and column max
people, lack of a better word happy. You know,
it's very joyful.
The model car is really popular design that we did
in a minute. It's quite incredible plant
that footprints fantastic, it's plump and it's
very graphic and the leaves are great.
And then we've also done an angle for which when
you really look at them almost look like a cherry
blossom in the water because that's obviously a
national symbol.
This is where it all started. And this hangs above
my head downstairs in the store. And the great
thing about this is a lot of clients and customers
Look at it, and all of a sudden the penny drops
when they can see the print. So there's the bird,
it appears the first time and then negative space
here. You can see it repeat itself and you can see
it on the left and the right. And then six months
later, fingers crossed, we have the result of that
print. And this is the text off. It's a homage to
our beautiful Eucalyptus and honey.
I like to think about February. And it like it has
a season with a really authentic production behind
Wareham printing in India with some of the best
artisans in the world. It takes between nine
months and a year to produce one print. It's slow
textiles. It's in a way it fast fashion. Because
it really we're trying to work against the idea of
anything being thrown away and I think we still on
track with that philosophy.
Ellie, when it first started, I discovered this
guy, Stan Kelly, who was a train driver and a self
taught botanical artist and he, he used to go
around no on the trains and like jump off the
train and grab branches of Eclipse
to try was speeding ahead with all the passengers
and students pulling out of the boat. Can you
imagine? I think
you guys have to pay at least I think that in the
60s going around Victoria that the trains were
probably going quite slow, but you know, and he's
got this incredible cross section, and it just
shows you all the beauty from the different sizes
of the lathes, the shapes of the leaves,
everything about them. I'll actually use this book
sometimes as inspiration and propose to Sophia we
should do this. So it's a great subject matter. I
always think I can never run out of things to
paint.
This is a Eucalyptus, young IANA, in a loose
family of large for family. So for this design, we
kind of worked on a cartographic decorative
outline and data. And quite a simple palette of
colors with a few highlights. The work that we do
is is really informed by a lot of decorative arts
traditions. And I was just obsessed by the idea of
kind of using the firewall tray. So if you really
wanted to do it and more geometric design, and so
we created a very kind of geometric, very
traditional textile.
And it's this beautiful oceanic grain. It was
actually really interesting because we just
printed the sampling, and then I took it away. And
out US market was like, Wow, that's amazing. What
is it? And I was like, Oh, it's a figment of our
imagination. On linen. I didn't say that. But it's
like there's a lot of layers and I guess you could
ask any creative What is it behind that you're
doing? But outside of just illustrating and
printing it? This like probably 6 million
Conversations while we're sending what interesting
thing about it is, and it looks incredibly
abstract to the most kind of wild looking thing.
A lot of Australians, you know, we look at the
avatar as being better than being here, whereas
what we have here is actually absolutely
fantastic. And when you look at Australian native
plants, they're so beautiful and unusual. And they
just have these cookie quality to them, like
what's not to love. They've got so much
personality.
And when you think of Australia, it has such a
kind of an incredible visual identity. I mean,
it's the blue sky. It's a landscape, it's the
plants, animals, they're the things that actually
really kind of tie us to this place.
