Mandarin

Textiles

1966

Designed by Linda Harper (British, active 20th century)
Manufactured by Hull Traders (1957-1980), London then Trawden, Lancashire

Linda Harper’s Mandarin (1966), a psychedelic Op Art paisley, combines the visual intensity of a swirling and fractured high-contrast, black-and-white pattern with violet and brown undulating, globular forms. The design exemplifies the textiles that the creatively oriented firm Hull Traders produced in collaboration with designers, such as Shirley Craven and Linda Harper, during the 1960s and 1970s. Overall, the extruded, entangled biomorphic forms resemble the flowing fluids of a lava lamp. These melting, shifting shapes and motifs set the stage for Shirley Craven’s Curtain Up (1970), another vibrant and mind-bending design.

Established in 1957, Hull Traders began as a firm dedicated to promoting the work of experimental designers in all media, but after two years shifted to focus on textile printing. Mandarin is an example of “A Time Present Fabric,” a special collection that Hull launched in 1960. The name references the firm’s early days, when they held exhibitions of artists’ works, in various media, that were called Time Present. The moniker comes from the T. S. Eliot poem “Burnt Norton,” and specifically the stanza “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” With this clever, albeit esoteric word play, Hull Traders emphasized their modern approach to interiors.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Textiles

Artists: Linda Harper (Designer) , Hull Traders Ltd. (Manufacturer)
Title: Mandarin
Places: United Kingdom (Artist's nationality), England (Object made in)
Date: Made 1966
Medium: Cotton, satin weave; screen printed
Dimensions: 267.7 × 128.3 cm (105 3/8 × 50 1/2 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Francesca Galloway Gallery in honor of Christa C. Mayer Thurman
Reference Number: 2021.411

Francesca Galloway. 2020. Fabric Revolution: Women Designers in 1960s Britain. London: Francesca Galloway Ltd. 30-31.

Private collection, East Bolden, England, c. 1960s [this and the following according to correspondence from Francesca Galloway, May 10, 2021, which describes that the collector owned a furnishing shop and acquired fabrics for a private collection in the 1950s and ’60s; copy in curatorial object file]; by descent in the family to his daughter Jill Ferrier, by 2003; sold at auction in East Boldon, England, to Francesca Galloway, London, c. 2003- 2005 [Galloway 2020, 15–17]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2021.

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