Clarissa Hulse and the Art of Bringing the Outside In
Highbury Fields, on an ordinary weekday morning: a stretch of grass and trees a few streets from Clarissa Hulse's North London studio, and one of her main sources of raw material. She photographs the leaves there herself, then again wherever she happens to be, a tropical rainforest, a market stall, her own garden, before those images become the botanical prints she's built a twenty five year career on.
The Serendipity design featuring on cushions interior fabrics.
This month, Selvedge is giving readers the chance to bring a little of that garden home. One winner will receive a bed linen set and two cushions in Hulse's Serendipity design, worth £268, with the set available in whichever size suits their own bed. Printed on cotton sateen, the design turns leaves, vines, stems and flowers into an enchanted garden across the fabric, rendered in a palette running from rich olive through pistachio to sage and emerald.
A colourful selection of Clarissa Hulse hand printed fabrics.
Hulse's route to this point wasn't a straight line from art school to homeware. Born in Prague, where her father was posted as a diplomat, she spent her childhood moving through Bangkok, Brussels, Athens and Vienna, with summers in her mother's native Greece. Wherever they landed, her mother furnished the new house with textiles and handicrafts bought from local markets, filling the rooms with botanical finds until they felt lived in. Hulse has said this shaped her own eye for pattern and interiors.
Clarissa Hulse (left) screen printing in her studio.
She trained at Brighton Art College in the 1990s, then moved to London to work freelance, drawn early on to screen printing. Her hand-printed scarves sold fast, picked up by Liberty, Barney's, Neiman Marcus and Joyce in Hong Kong, and the range expanded into clothing, kimonos and loungewear. But fashion's pace wore thin. In 2002 she launched a homewares collection instead, stocked by Heals and the Conran Shop, and has since built fabric and wallpaper lines with Harlequin alongside bed linen and cushions for John Lewis, NEXT and M&S.
Portrait of Clarissa Hulse preparing print binder for her home interior fabrics.
Readers who want to see the process behind the cloth can visit her studio on Saturday 19 September as part of London Textile Month, for an open studio, demonstration, and talk. The afternoon includes a look through decades of sketchbooks and mood boards, a screen printing demonstration, and for a few lucky guests, the chance to print something themselves. A 10% discount applies to studio pieces on the day, from hand-printed backing cloth artworks to cashmere scarves.
Between the giveaway and the open studio, it's worth pausing on how a photograph of a London park leaf ends up as a repeat pattern on someone's bed, and how a childhood moving across five different cities became a career spent making home feel like home.
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Further Information:
Enter the prize draw on the Selvedge website for your chance to win.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Clarissa Hulse Serendipity Design, featured on bed Linens and cushion covers.
All further images courtesy of Clarissa Hulse.