Design for textile by Karin Heath Warming, c.1960-1975

Folder bound in brown cloth containing 109 sheets of abstract and stylised textile designs and patterns, photocopies of ornament, photographs of buildings which suggest abstract pattern, tracings and images cut from magazines.

Given by Mrs Jane Palmer

Item Provenance: Bequeathed by the designer to the donor, Mrs Jane Palmer

Karin Warming taught textile design at Camberwell College of Art for many years (one of her students was Georgina van Etzdorf), and sold a large number of designs to British textile and wallpaper manufacturers from the 1940s to the 1970s. She had studied art and design at Redhill School of Art in 1933 and then Chelsea College of Art from 1934 until 1937. She then opened her own textile printing workshop in partnership with Anne Morgan until she joined the WRNS in 1943. In 1938 the Department of Textiles and Dress of the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired four examples of printed fabrics made by these designers, museum numbers: Circ.152, 153, 155, 156, 157-1938. After her war service she taught part time at Camberwell from 1947 until 1978, concentrating latterly on block printing. Between 1947 and 1952 she also taught part time at Guildford. Karin Warming's folders and scrapbooks are particularly interesting as they show how she derived ideas for stylised and abstract designs from natural forms, from architectural forms and from photographs of all kinds of objects, finding inspiration in the underlying patterns inherent in everyday things. She experimented with unorthodox methods of pattern making, which included using resists, impressions from natural objects and random effects from colour mixing.

E.413:98-1997