3 minute read
Arts & Culture
A myriad of shapes and colours dancing together
Annie Phillips - batik artist extraordinaire at the Fashion and Textile Museum
By Susan Isaacs Arts and Culture Correspondent
A pixie-like figure with an enormous grin, hair tied back in a blonde ponytail, skips across the zoom room to show me her work.
She is in overalls that she has dyed to a vivid orange, a lime green shirt, and carries in one hand, a tjanting, the essential tool of her trade. Meet Annie Phillips, batik artist and designer. Her batiks, wonderful bursts of rainbow colours, are appearing at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey Street, as part of an exhibition called
Chintz; Cotton in Bloom from 18th May - 15th August.
Her long love affair with batik began many years ago, standing in a queue, waiting to attend a life drawing class. When the class was cancelled, in a life changing moment, a friend suggested trying batik instead. “I was hooked. I loved the combination of applying wax to material and playing with pattern and colour…. my batiks are a myriad of shapes and colours dancing together.” The search to perfect her art has taken her all over the world. She visited Indonesia and Ghana, learning techniques from the people who lived there. I asked how batik is different there and her eyes light up. “Well, there the tradition is passed down from family to family, and it is a huge part of the culture. Years gone by it was the main way that clothes were made.”
Her work has evolved over the years. She started by teaching batik both to schoolchildren and adults. What really transformed her business was the digital revolution in the nineties. At the touch of a button, she could resize her pieces and change colours. ‘If my work is bought for a private home, a designer has to take into account everything that is there already. The work has to fit in with the scheme of the whole room.’ She loves her work, but years of earning a living at it have made her pragmatic. “You can’t be too precious. I once went along to see my work hanging in an office space, only to discover that a piece had been hung upside down. I bit my tongue and said how lovely it looked.... When you sell a piece, you cannot dictate how its displayed. You don’t own the rights to how other people see your work.” Her designs have been used by hotels and restaurants right around the world. Her very first success was with Pizza Express, who took many of her colourful pieces for a restaurant in Marlow. Since then, she has worked with companies such as Prezzo, Fortnum and Masons, Selfridges, Harrods, Stella Macartney, and the London Bridge Hotel in Southwark. Liberty’s have sold hand woven rugs replicating her original artworks. Her latest extraordinary success has been her ‘How to videos’ on the social media platform TikTok. Viewers are enthralled by her soothing voice and are hungry to learn. She has a vast following. “It’s incredible. When I first made the videos, I was not expecting to have 900,000 people in a class.” Once you have met her, you can see why immediately.
