Zulu Terrain is the most abstract design in the Ardmore partnership, and the only one where the subject has to be found rather than seen. It is a landscape, the rolling hills and meandering valleys of KwaZulu-Natal and the country around Ardmore's own farm, but described entirely through the points and curves of feathers and leaves billowing across the wall in long soft drifts.
The reading shifts as you look. At first it is pure pattern, a field of overlapping organic marks with no orientation. Then the drifts resolve into ridgelines and the darker passages into shaded valleys, and it becomes topography. Nothing in the drawing forces either reading, and the design is better for the ambiguity, since it can hold a whole room without ever becoming a picture of something.
The palettes are soft, muted and close to monochromatic, so despite the scale of the movement the paper behaves quietly on the wall. That combination is unusual and useful: it gives a room the presence of a large-scale design with the manners of a plain. It suits a bedroom, a study, a drawing room or a hall, and it sits comfortably with plain linen, natural matting, unpolished timber and very little pattern elsewhere.
