design et al are delighted to announce that The Silk Gallery have been shortlisted for a Fabric Award in The International Product Design Awards 2015
Inspiration for the new silk collection, “Reflections”, came from the Director -Kathryn Thompson’s, recent trips to Dubai in the U.A.E. The city’s dramatic 21st Century skyline is an architecture of geometric forms enclosed with flat surfaces and glass which shimmers in the sunlight from dawn to dusk.
The elegant skyscrapers, built with modern steel and glass engineering techniques, feature vertical and curved shapes of every type. It is these geometric shapes and their reflections on the surrounding landscape created by the passage of the sun which have inspired the new designs, Geo, Silhouette, Shadow, Spectrum, Rotation, Orbit, amongst others.
In “Silhouette” they have tried to capture the essence of the Palm Beach hotel in form and colour with the traversing sun. The colours of “Geo” attempt to convey the reflection of the mid-day light off the steel and glass Burj Khalifa whilst “Shadow” tries to capture a more sombre landscape in the fading light at end of the day.
The use of silk throughout this collection seems appropriate to convey the intense reflections of the sun off the skyline and the surrounding gulf waters as well as the haze off the desert backdrop. The colour pallet is likewise influenced not only by the cityscape but also takes into account the surrounding landscape of desert and sea with sandy tones and blue hues.