What if the limitation was the point? At East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, a new exhibition opens on 25 September built entirely around a single constraint: one printing screen, used again and again, until an entirely unique pattern emerges from it.
PRINT ROTATE REPEAT is an upcoming exhibition by British designer, printmaker and academic Kate Farley, the culmination of three years of research into how printed pattern gets made. Farley is Associate Professor and Course Leader for BA Textile Design at Norwich University of the Arts, and her practice moves fluidly between studio and classroom. Her work has been commissioned by Transport for London and the Barbican Centre, and sits in the collections of the British Library and Tate. In 2023 she published Repeat Printed Pattern for Interiors, a study of the principles and history of printed pattern in interior design.
Kate Farley Screenprinting 'Vortex'. Photo courtesy of Kate Farley.
Vortex, by Kate Farley. Image courtesy of the artist.
The technique at the centre of this new show rewrites a basic rule of textile printing. Conventionally, each colour in a design needs its own block or screen, printed in careful sequence to build the finished pattern layer by layer. Farley abandons that model. Each printed length is built from a single screen, rotated repeatedly across the cloth so that every turn adds a new layer to what came before, until one screen has generated a whole design from itself. Across the exhibition, Farley has developed seven such screens, each the starting point for its own family of patterns, and has printed over 100 metres of cloth in the process.
The visual language stays deliberately minimal. Every pattern grows from the triangle, the circle and the square, the geometric elements that have shaped decorated surfaces for centuries, and the colour palette begins with the primaries: red, blue and yellow. From these limited starting points, rotation alone generates the complexity, pattern built through repetition and transformation rather than accumulation.
'Scatter' by Kate Farley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Farley has thought deeply about why pattern holds this pull on us in the first place. She traces our attachment to it back to childhood, to the first cot blanket and the curtains of a childhood home, the gingham of a school uniform, arguing that these early exposures shape a relationship with motif, colour and rhythm that lasts a lifetime. Elsewhere, she points to pattern's less visual forms, the sequences of Morse code and Braille, and the way repetition in music, from a pop chorus to Mozart's variations, builds anticipation into something we recognise before it fully arrives. For Farley, pattern is "a way of bringing order to an environment of apparent visual noise and clutter", whether that pattern is designed with intent or simply noticed by chance, like swallows lined up on a telegraph wire.
Sketchbooks, design notes, and samples by Kate Farley. Photo: Denisa Ilie
Patterns from the Print, Rotate, Repeat exhibition by Kate Farley. Photo: Denisa Ilie
That thinking runs directly into the exhibition. As AI tools and increasingly capable software take on more of the work of generating pattern, Farley's research asks what still belongs to the designer alone. Her answer runs through the work itself: each rotation is a decision, shaped by judgement, intuition and taste, that could not have been made by an algorithm working from a brief.
There's a practical case being made too. Farley's single-screen method offers a more economical route through production, and a way of keeping creative ownership close to the person who conceived the design in the first place.
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Further Information:
Curated by Claire Allerton, PRINT ROTATE REPEAT runs at East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, until 24 October 2026. Admission is free, Tuesday to Friday 12–5pm, Saturday 12–4pm.
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Image Credits:
Lead: 'Evolve' by Kate Farley. Photo courtesy of the artist.
All further images as credited in photo captions.