This is Seasonal Woods printed onto raw silk, and the substrate changes what the design is. Silver birches painted in a soft hand stand through a woodland where a whole year happens at once, ivy and holly, brambles and apples, birds in the branches and butterflies between, across six drops that complete a scene 3.12 metres wide by 4 metres high. The birches are the constant; almost everything else in the scene belongs to a different month.
Raw silk carries slubs, the irregular thickenings that occur naturally in the fibre, and they appear across the wall without pattern or prediction, so no two rolls are the same. Those slubs catch light along their length and give the woodland a shifting, low lustre that a printed paper cannot reproduce. The surface changes through the day rather than staying fixed.
It works as a single panorama on one wall, or repeated to line a room. Being a fixed composition it needs measuring and setting out before ordering, with allowance for how skirtings and cornices will crop the scene. Silk is a considered choice for a room that is not heavily used: a principal bedroom, a drawing room, a dining room where the material can be looked at closely and looked after. Silk is best kept away from direct sun and from walls that take daily contact.
