Paint! Pattern! Print! The Textiles of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell

Colourful and surprising exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum looking at the textile designs of the sisters Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell.

I say surprising because I hadn't realised how popular their work was and how much of it I had owned or remembered. I had bought a painting by them at an exhibition at the National Theatre a number of years ago without really knowing that much about them.

The show highlighted how they not only designed the patterns but oversaw how these designs were transferred to the textile allowing them to control the colours and retain the copyright of the design. The designs were hand painted and in many cases the show had the original painting and examples of the textile in different colour way.

The sisters worked for Liberty in the 1970s and designed Bauhaus for them which I recognised. Later in the decade they worked for Terence Conran at Habitat and those designed were so familiar to me.

The show looked at how they adapted to the market and also looked at work by Campbell following her sister's death in 2011. I loved the mix of display cases of textiles, room settings and groupings of clothing. There was a fun room at the end looking at their bedding designs displayed on the wall as if on a bed.

Closes 13 September 2026