The quirks of Australian Flora we could talk about ad nauseum for the next three weeks, like you
could really throw it out there unlike anything else. pretty proud of.
I'm not sure whether I can add anything to that.
Um, for slark I'm one half of utopia goods design studio and manufacturer of textiles and other
furnishing products. The artist hand of the business, the ongoing mission mission to take
Australian fabrics
to the world. Yeah. I'm Sophie Tetlow. And together with Bruce we are on a mission to make
Australian native inspired fabrics.
We live in Sydney and so we want to kind of celebrate that and
we don't want to be status. So we have to dip into Western Australia. We have to dip into Victoria
being ex mo burnings, but it gets Really, it's sort of focuses on the beauty of the plant
regardless of where it's from. The other thing is we wanted to celebrate collar. I mean I've got a
bit of a personal joke life's too short for gray unless you're short and gray. And you know color
is so wonderful and exciting and column max people, lack of a better word happy. You know,
it's very joyful.
The model car is really popular design that we did in a minute. It's quite incredible plant
that footprints fantastic, it's plump and it's very graphic and the leaves are great.
And then we've also done an angle for which when you really look at them almost look like a cherry
blossom in the water because that's obviously a national symbol.
This is where it all started. And this hangs above my head downstairs in the store. And the great
thing about this is a lot of clients and customers Look at it, and all of a sudden the penny drops
when they can see the print. So there's the bird, it appears the first time and then negative space
here. You can see it repeat itself and you can see it on the left and the right. And then six months
later, fingers crossed, we have the result of that print. And this is the text off. It's a homage to
our beautiful Eucalyptus and honey.
I like to think about February. And it like it has a season with a really authentic production behind
Wareham printing in India with some of the best artisans in the world. It takes between nine
months and a year to produce one print. It's slow textiles. It's in a way it fast fashion. Because
it really we're trying to work against the idea of anything being thrown away and I think we still on
track with that philosophy.
Ellie, when it first started, I discovered this guy, Stan Kelly, who was a train driver and a self
taught botanical artist and he, he used to go around no on the trains and like jump off the
train and grab branches of Eclipse
to try was speeding ahead with all the passengers and students pulling out of the boat. Can you
imagine? I think
you guys have to pay at least I think that in the 60s going around Victoria that the trains were
probably going quite slow, but you know, and he's got this incredible cross section, and it just
shows you all the beauty from the different sizes of the lathes, the shapes of the leaves,
everything about them. I'll actually use this book sometimes as inspiration and propose to Sophia we
should do this. So it's a great subject matter. I always think I can never run out of things to
paint.
This is a Eucalyptus, young IANA, in a loose family of large for family. So for this design, we
kind of worked on a cartographic decorative outline and data. And quite a simple palette of
colors with a few highlights. The work that we do is is really informed by a lot of decorative arts
traditions. And I was just obsessed by the idea of kind of using the firewall tray. So if you really
wanted to do it and more geometric design, and so we created a very kind of geometric, very
traditional textile.
And it's this beautiful oceanic grain. It was actually really interesting because we just
printed the sampling, and then I took it away. And out US market was like, Wow, that's amazing. What
is it? And I was like, Oh, it's a figment of our imagination. On linen. I didn't say that. But it's
like there's a lot of layers and I guess you could ask any creative What is it behind that you're
doing? But outside of just illustrating and printing it? This like probably 6 million
Conversations while we're sending what interesting
thing about it is, and it looks incredibly abstract to the most kind of wild looking thing.
A lot of Australians, you know, we look at the avatar as being better than being here, whereas
what we have here is actually absolutely fantastic. And when you look at Australian native
plants, they're so beautiful and unusual. And they just have these cookie quality to them, like
what's not to love. They've got so much personality.
And when you think of Australia, it has such a kind of an incredible visual identity. I mean,
it's the blue sky. It's a landscape, it's the plants, animals, they're the things that actually
really kind of tie us to this place.