Design Inspiration

Inspiration for a collection comes from surprising sources! It might be a memory of a place or simply something seen – it might be the weather or a world event.

The main theme is to bring movement and energy to the cloth and clothes in your wardrobe. Movement comes from the fluid nature of the silk fabrics and is implied in the painted marks. World events certainly confound  – and after 9/11/2001 the word ‘Adjustment’ was printed huge across all the painted clothes.

It was difficult to know what else to say at that time.

A recent visit to the studio of painter Frances Bacon, , recreated in exactitude in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin prompted two collections. Bacon used the door of his Reece Mews studio as a palette and it is covered with marks , paint tests and smears .

It is bursting with visual energy, beautiful and random.

This approach was brought to the painting on silk for a summer collection – starting with random colours, she tried to push them around to find some visual logic. The fascination with this as process extended into a much darker group of garments for Winter 2013, flashes of paintmarks hover and float without necessarily having any relationship with each other across the garments.

The weather IS a big influence. Carole lives near Bath in Somerset where the hilly and beautiful terrain is a constant reminder of the drama in sky , sun and the changing seasons.

“It’s so amazing to wear a Carole Waller garment.”

Bel Mooney, Columnist, Daily Mail

Colour and light are in constant flux and change the appearance of the landscape , large and intimate

Carole reiterates this in the making of paintings use the dynamic process of the marks spreading and drying in the cloth likes stains – revealing the process of liquids in movement  – colour and light is pushing its way through the weave in the same way that light pushes its way through leaves and vegetation in the landscape. Change is also inherent the paintings because they are clothes .They are worn, and  therefore altered,  by different people with different styles, and in different contexts.

The mist and rain literally falling over the mountain tops of the Dingle peninsula  in south west Ireland led to group of ‘Mountain Coats’ – in which she tried to capture with liquid dyes the sense of unexpected and dramatic change implied by the heavy rain clouds.

Kite skating on Brittanny beaches instigated one collection and stained glass windows in Malvern Priory another.

Carole used to live on a small sailing boat in the Mediterranean and the sense of infinity experienced at sea extends into her paintings on clothes, for walls and in glass.

“The person to go to if you want – need, demand – more colour in your life.”

Deirdre McSharry, Writer / Editor