With the Slow Color collection for Designtex, artist and designer Alisa Benfey explores how some colours and patterns achieve a universal and timeless appeal. The now-Los Angeles-based Benfey was born in Japan, where “celebrating the seasons is embedded in the culture,” which played a major role in her appreciation for and approach to design. “It shaped me and my colour sensibility. I appreciate nature and want to bring it into the built development,” she says. To that end, the Slow Color collection from Designtex utilizes the traditional Japanese art form of Kusaki-zome, or seasonal botanical dyeing, to create the nature-inspired motifs and hues.
Taking a completely hands-on approach, Benfey collected flowers, kitchen scraps, tree leaves and vegetables from around her neighbourhood and used techniques like Shibori, steam dyeing and plant pounding to create distinct patterns and hues directly on the fabric. Designtex then translated resulting designs into high-performance, digitally-printed-on-demand wallcoverings and textiles: Kusaki and Kusaki Wall, Sora, Kage, Kiku, Tsuki and Kuwa.
Kusaki (a 100 per cent polyester upholstery textile) and Kusaki Wall (a coated wallcovering) feature a striking prismatic motif that Benfey developed by sprinkling botanicals like chrysanthemum petals, onion skins and madder root onto a fabric, bundling them together and then steam-dyeing the bunch.
For Kusaki Wall, the artist scaled up the kaleidoscopic pattern to bring an element of the natural world to interiors. When viewed from afar, the subdued colours lend an atmospheric effect, while up close, greater details and textures are revealed. Both Kusaki and Kusaki Wall are available in four colours that reflect the botanical materials used to create them: Madder, Marigold, Black Bean and Logwood.
Meaning “sky” in Japanese, Sora was created through the traditional tie-dye technique of Shibori. To develop the cloud-like pattern, fabrics were scrunched and then immersed in dyes made from avocado pits, indigo, oak bark and other botanicals, lending the wallcovering a softly shifting gradient. Sora is available in 12 colours: Iron, Rust, Black Walnut, Eucalyptus Bark, Chamomile, Sagebrush, Woad, Ivy, Indigo, Black Bean, Logwood and Avocado Pit.
The final three patterns in the Slow Color collection from Designtex (Kage, Kiku and Tsuki) are grouped as the Itajime Series and were inspired by the Japanese block-resist textile dyeing technique it’s named for. A variation of Shibori, Itajime involves folding a textile in a specific way, clamping it between blocks of wood and then bathing it in dye.
Kage, meaning “shadow,” features large-scale square forms with softened and blurred edges and overlapping colours. An inventive and artful floral, Kiku (the Japanese word for chrysanthemum) was developed using flower-shaped wooden blocks to create a layered floral pattern. Evoking the waxing and waning moon, Tsuki boasts an irregular circle motif with crescent-shaped details.
