Prism is a reduction of Circus, the larger harlequin design, brought down in scale and opened out in colour. The diamonds have become shards, irregular and overlapping, and the pattern reads less as a grid than as light broken through glass, which is what the name intends.
It is printed by four-colour separation, unusual for a wallpaper of this kind and the reason so many tones are present in the design. Rather than a fixed set of inks laid one beside another, the colours are built optically, so shards blend into their neighbours and the surface takes on a graduated quality that a flat-printed geometric cannot achieve. The two colourways are very different in temperament, one saturated and full, the other a muted kaleidoscope that reads almost as texture.
The 76 cm repeat on a wide 0.69 m roll gives the shards room to build, and the straight match keeps the facet rows true across the drops. A design like this earns its place in a room that is otherwise plain: a modern flat, a garden room, a stair with good light. Set against plain upholstery and simple joinery it looks deliberate; set against other pattern it does not. Rolls run to 10 m in length.
