Wellington city landscape inspires 'brooding' textile design

Textile designer Sheree Davis' alternative to the clean, green touristy image of New Zealand was inspired by Wellington hillside suburbs.

Her design is hand-printed on to hemp fabric, using transparency ink. Called Urban Intrusion, she says the idea for the textile came after she studied imagery used by the Tourism Board and realised that there are many special parts of the nation's landscape that tend to be ignored but are no less compelling.

The textile has won recognition from design magazine Home New Zealand, which recently published a feature on Ms Davis, the only textile designer to be a finalist in its annual design awards.

Her entry was described as “a lonely, slightly haunting design of suburban sprawl in the hills of Karori, Wellington". Ms Davis' “brooding graphic, where weatherboard houses are hidden behind tree-clad hills interspersed with electricity pylons, captures the everyday mundanity [sic] of our suburban landscape".

Ms Davis completed a Bachelor of Design, majoring in textile design, at Massey Wellington last year. The Urban Intrusion fabric was a project completed during the fourth year of her study. For the awards entry, it was printed for her by two fourth-year Design students, Amy Pyle and Amy van Luijk.

“We shouldn’t just be looking at nature – we should be appreciating contemporary scenery as well," she says. "There’s something majestic about a pylon – we’ve just been taught not to appreciate them.”

She says she is honoured to have been singled out by Home New Zealand, which runs the awards with the Auckland-based Eon design company. “Being featured in the magazine this way has already lifted my profile in the industry and opened doors for me. My work has been featured as being new and having a different spin and that is attracting interest.”

Ms Davis works for an Auckland wholesale furnishing fabric company and is also starting her own label, selling both textiles and jewellery. She says her Massey study has proved valuable as she makes her way forward in the industry. “It equipped me with the right tools and pointed me in the right directions.”

Textiles Programme Leader Dr Sandy Heffernan says Ms Davis was a great student and very passionate about her work.