Tracy Kendall’s “Lace Scroll” - Lace from a Parisian flea market that Tracy exposed directly to silkscreen along with the original gaps and tears. “I wanted to leave it alone and showcase it in the condition I found it,” she says.
It’s redundant to remark that wallpaper is back. So what’s new?
In short, Tracy Kendall.
The British designer approaches wallpaper from a delightfully off-the-wall angle. Eccentric, distinctive and fashion-forward, Tracy’s wallcoverings have garnered awards at the ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair), and hang in museums such as the Copper Hewitt in New York.
I recently had the chance to chat with the woman who’s out to challenge our conception of wallpaper when she dropped into Hollace Cluny – the Toronto boutique that stocks her striking innovations. Here are some highlights…
STYLE SLEUTH: Your wallcoverings range from scrolls that hang from the wall to more conventional pasted-to-the-wall papers. Are you ever suprised at the applications homeowners and designers have in mind for your creations?
TRACY KENDALL: What’s nice is that people can use the work in whichever way is appropriate for their environment. I’m not dictating to them how it should be applied. Rather, I’m giving them the opportunity to find ways to make it work. I’ve seen a whole room full of my Peacock Feather. The fronds of the peacock take on the appearance of stripes running horizontally, because there’s so many of them. But other people have just a single peacock feather, and it’s their choice – I think it’s nice that the work can actually take either level of installation.
Tracy Kendall’s “Peacock Feather” - stunning in its simplicity!
STYLE SLEUTH: Can you let us in on your design process?
TRACY KENDALL: Sometimes designs come to me really fast – I’ll see something, get inspired and do two or three designs instantly, but other designs will take a couple of years before I’ve thought them through enough. I try very hard to make everything very, very simple. To me, there isn’t that much of a leap from A to B, because it’s actually one simple idea, shown in its simplest form. It might be quite extreme, but that is only a feather on the wallpaper. Those are only jigsaw pieces. There are no layers of ideas – I can’t do complex layers of ideas; my brain doesn’t work that way. I believe you should show what you want to show, and that can be very complex.
Tracy Kendall’s “Books” scroll
STYLE SLEUTH: Do you ever surprise yourself, seeing your designs full-scale and applied in an actual room setting?
TRACY KENDALL: When I’m screenprinting one of the big works, I’m very much in control. I’ve been screenprinting for more than 35 years, so I know exactly what’s going to happen. But I like working with mosaic pieces like Jigsaw and In The White Room, because you’re only working on a very small section at a time, and it’s only when you see the full length of it up on the wall that it hits you. At the ICFF, when we put up a whole wall of the Jigsaw, it was kind of like, “Ooh, you’ve really done something there!” I like not being entirely in control. In some ways it’s a risk, but it’s like cooking – if all the ingredients are good, then you should have a good meal.
Tracy Kendall’s “Jigsaw”
STYLE SLEUTH: Would you ever do a 10-by-10′ focal wall of “Puzzle” for instance? How long would that take? Just as importantly, how long would it last?
TRACY KENDALL: Certainly. It took about six days to set up a 10-by-10′ wall for the ICFF, and thousands of people were poking at it throughout the week. The tactile nature of it is part of the joy of it. When pasted to the wall, it’s highly durable and very strong stuff!
STYLE SLEUTH: Some of your earliest designs simply involved blowing up everyday items to larger-than-life scale. Where did that idea come from?
TRACY KENDALL: I needed some wallpaper for myself at home, but at the time, I couldn’t afford any of the large-scale wallpaper prints that I liked. Id’ always done quite large prints (I’d trained for art printmaking for my first degree, and then worked for years in fashion textiles), so I worked out what size would fit my room and came up with this seven-foot-tall cutlery set. As soon as I’d actually produced the first one, I knew that I hadn’t seen it anywhere before. I immediately did some flowers straight afterwards, just to check that the concept wasn’t going to be confined to a one-off thing. I’d love to say it was all planned and calculated, but none of it is!
Tracy Kendall’s “Cutlery” - flatware on a grand scale!
STYLE SLEUTH: Will the cutlery be your lasting icon?
TRACY KENDALL: Either that, or In The White Room. Those are my two most instantly identifiable designs.
Tracy Kendall’s “In The White Room” - a mosaic of wallpaper pieces attached by the finest stitched lines
STYLE SLEUTH: What’s the most surreal idea you’ve ever had for a wall treatment?
TRACY KENDALL: I’ve got some fibre optics sitting in the cupboard, and I think it would be really nice to see if I could make those work technically, because unfortunately, they need to plug in, and I love the challenge of overcoming that. I also love the challenge of making wallcoverings work for a residential environment. I’m generally dealing with something that a wallpaper hanger will have to paste to the wall, something they will be able to understand and work with, and something that’s got a nice durability.
STYLE SLEUTH: What do you hope your designs inspire in others?
TRACY KENDALL: To go with your heart, really. It’s quite a big commitment to put a seven-foot feather in your house. I think you should go with things that you love at first sight.
Tracy Kendall wallcoverings are available through Hollace Cluny, 888-968-7660.
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