Cole & Son | Scenic Flora - Japanese Paperweave

This is Scenic Flora on Japanese paperweave, and the ground is doing as much as the drawing. Paperweave is made by weaving fine paper strands into a cloth-like sheet, so the surface carries a visible warp and weft running beneath the whole design, giving it the quality of an embroidered panel rather than a printed one.

That reference is apt. The design was taken from vintage embroidered kimono and from seventeenth-century Japanese chinoiserie, and it is built in receding theatrical planes so that the field of wildflowers reads at several depths. On woven paper the flowers acquire a slight physical texture, and light travels differently across the horizontal strands than across the verticals.

It is supplied as a panel, 140 cm wide by 3.5 metres high, so the wall should be measured and set out before ordering. Paperweave is a natural material and varies between panels, which is a characteristic of the substrate rather than a fault. Given both material and composition it belongs in a carefully used room: a principal bedroom, a drawing room, a dining room where it can be seen from a distance and studied close to. Woven paper is more robust than silk in daily use while keeping much of the same softness of surface.