An exhibition of handcrafted works by Lucienne Day (1917-2010), one of Britain’s most innovative textile designers of the twentieth century. The first exhibition to focus exclusively on Lucienne’s Silk Mosaics since her death in 2010, the show brings together a carefully-curated selection from private collections and institutions. The display provides a rare opportunity to examine these stunning but subtle textiles at close quarters, including several complex large-scale works created for public spaces, as well as more intimate jewel-like smaller works.

Blazing onto the scene at the Festival of Britain in 1951, Lucienne Day was widely acclaimed for her strikingly modern printed furnishing fabrics for progressive firms such as Heal’s and Edinburgh Weavers, pioneering a new style of abstract pattern-making that captured the optimistic, forward-looking spirit of the early post-war era. Taking inspiration from the Bauhaus and modern art, Lucienne was an inspired colourist and developed new forms of organic and geometric imagery that broke with tradition.

A woman of many talents, Lucienne Day excelled in many other fields of surface pattern design, including wallpapers, ceramics, table linen and carpets. She also worked for many years as design consultant to the John Lewis Partnership, collaborating with her equally gifted husband, furniture designer Robin Day.

Although best known as an industrial designer, Lucienne Day later focused on the creation of one-off textile hangings. These intricate pieces, which she called Silk Mosaics, were meticulously hand-crafted from rectangular strips of multi-coloured silk stitched together in abstract geometric designs. Like the work of the renowned textile artist Anni Albers, Lucienne Day’s Silk Mosaic compositions are uncompromisingly modern, yet somehow timeless, drawing on traditional making skills. It is this lesser-known but significant aspect of Lucienne’s diverse oeuvre which is celebrated in this exhibition, assembled from the 200 or so unique pieces she created over the course of two decades from the late 1970s until the end of the 1990s.

By the 1970s the British textile industry was in decline and, as the decade progressed, Lucienne felt increasingly out of sync with contemporary stylistic developments. Seeking a new creative outlet that would enable her to practice more independently, she came up with the novel idea of wall-based works of art made from squares or rectangles of coloured silk sewn together, supported by a stiffer fabric backing. The term Silk Mosaic was coined because the individual units were so small that they recalled the tesserae in Roman mosaics. This allusion was particularly apt because the vivid sparkling qualities of the glass tesserae were mirrored in the richly-coloured dyed silks of the Silk Mosaics.

In spite of the obvious parallels with patchwork, Lucienne consciously dissociated her creations from this centuries-old female domestic tradition. The highly labour-intensive hand-sewing was outsourced to skilled seamstresses (Henrietta Brooks and Lucienne’s niece, Karin Conradi) so that she could focus on the designs. Although the graphic element was important, however, the textile medium was absolutely crucial in bringing her designs to life. Lucienne particularly enjoyed selecting the colours and textures of the Indian and Thai silk fabrics, exploiting slubby yarns and the two-tone iridescence of shot silks (woven from different coloured warp and weft) to add extra subtlety and depth to her designs. The flexibility of the Silk Mosaic medium provided the perfect foil for her skills as a colourist as she could choose from an almost unlimited palette to create subtle tonal shifts or arresting colour contrasts.

Lucienne Day proudly exhibited her Silk Mosaics in a series of solo shows during her later career. Several pieces were acquired by leading museums, including the V&A, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg. Her Silk Mosaics marked the culmination of a lifetime of remarkable creative achievements. This exhibition is the first time that a significant group of these important late works has been reassembled since the Days’ joint retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London in 2001, Robin and Lucienne Day – Pioneers of Contemporary Design.

A selection of the Silk Mosaics will form the content of the Margaret Howell Calendar 2025

Text by Lesley Jackson, Writer, Curator and Design Historian.
With thanks to the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and to the lenders for their kind support.