The designs for the fabrics featured in the artist’s film started life as drawings inspired by the pioneering Trinidadian textile designer Althea McNish (1924 - 2020). Celebrated for her bold use of colour and multilayering of pattern, McNish was one of the UK’s most innovative textile artists whose creative vision transformed post-war design.

Althea McNish is one of the most important names in British textile design history. With a career that began designing for Liberty Fabrics back in the 1950s, she was known for what she referred to as a ‘tropical eye’: a lively, riotous approach to pattern and colour that presented a more positive vision to the sombre post-war atmosphere of the time.

Liberty's Fabrics

There was a confidence and a flamboyance to the way she experimented with pattern-making that set her apart from other post-war designers. She worked fearlessly with colour, once saying, 

What is there to be afraid of? (Colour) is a language of its own. You don’t hold on to that. You spread it around you…It’s fun, get on with it.

In early 2022 the William Morris Gallery opened a landmark retrospective Althea McNish: Colour is Mine. Inspired by drawings and designs on display, which incorporated botanical motifs from both the Caribbean and the UK, Bryony Benge-Abbott led a series of ‘Wild Drawing in Colour’ workshops alongside the exhibition. Wild drawing is a practice of engaging sensory and emotional responses to the natural landscape through experimental mark-making. Working in the gallery’s gardens, members of the public joined Benge-Abbott in sketching using McNish’s vibrant palette. The resulting artworks were turned into patterns and printed onto silks, lycra and mesh (pictured top), to be animated through dance in the The Colour of Transformation film.

It feels fitting that the world through which the dancers move in The Colour of Transformation holds contemporary observations of the natural world inspired by the legacy of Althea McNish. She was a pioneer and the first designer of Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition. As Dr Rose Sinclair, Co-Curator of Althea McNish: Colour is Mine, writes in the introduction to the exhibition,

As a Black woman, McNish is rare in the history of postmodern design and textiles. McNish herself had no such role models. Although she wouldn’t have described herself as a radical in the political sense, she told me, “I opened the doors so others could follow.”