Cole & Son | Acacia Canopy

Acacia Canopy comes out of the Ardmore studio's way of working, where a ceramic surface is never left plain and every field of the piece is given its own pattern. Transferred to paper, that instinct produces a canopy of acacia leaves drawn so densely that the wall becomes a thicket. There is no ground to speak of; the leaves are the ground, overlapping and turning so the eye keeps finding a new layer behind the one it had settled on.

Butterflies are worked into the foliage rather than placed on top of it, and they take a moment to find. Once found they organise the whole design, giving the eye somewhere to rest between the passages of leaf. The drawing is flat and decorative in the ceramic manner, with detail carried by line and by shifts of tone rather than by modelled shadow, which keeps a large pattern from feeling heavy overhead.

This is a paper for a room you want enclosed: a dining room, a small study, a cloakroom where the pattern can turn every corner. The roll is 0.7 m wide, letting the canopy build across a wall with fewer joins, and the 70 cm straight repeat keeps the leaves aligned across drops. Rolls run to 8 m rather than the usual 10, so quantities are worth checking twice against the drop height.