Interview with Maxine Hall & Paula Moss of Blackpop

Blackpop was a midlife plunge into the unknown for me. Prior to starting the business, I was a university lecturer in fine art and digital media alongside which I had my own fine art practice using photography and graphics in Photoshop.  For a long time, I had been looking for surfaces to put my artwork onto. I started out printing it directly onto furniture that had flat surfaces such as coffee tables.

It became difficult to sustain this – they were truly stunning but the post-production i.e. sourcing suitable pieces where the tops could be taken off and the sanding down, became too labour intensive. Then I came across some digitally printed fabric and I was instantly excited! Manufacturing in this way had only just come online back in 2012. I eagerly created a few patterns inspired by visits to nearby stately homes such as Chatsworth House and developed an elegantly distressed collection of wallpaper designs. Blackpop’s fabric came online a couple of years later. My motivation was triggered by my desire to spend my time being innovative, creative and to be a successful business woman.

Your designs are exquisite, can you tell us a little about how the process works?

We work from a digital palette of photographs that we deconstruct in Photoshop, mixed with scanned in painted artwork and graphics created in Illustrator.

For the ‘Tudors Deconstructed’ collection we worked with the National Portrait Gallery’s world renowned collection of Tudor portraits where we were sent high-resolution images, some made microscopically and others with state of the art cameras. These became our digital palette. Then I had to think how to deconstruct [that word again] the portraits as I didn’t want to simply replicate them. I made painterly textured backgrounds, embedding graphics of crowns and orbs that I made in Illustrator, then I decided to draw Kandinsky/Miro like shapes and fill them with the pigments/pixels from the portraits. All of these elements sit on different layers, so you have control over each element, which allows you to play around until you think it’s finished.

What was your source of inspiration for your Paradise range?

We wanted to design a collection that took its inspiration from something dark and dramatic. We’ve got a very old, battered and beautiful copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the plates which are by Doré are gorgeous. Whilst Paradise is a collection which is much more graphic in style than any of our previous ranges, it still has Blackpop’s design DNA running through it. On the whole ‘Paradise’ is more motif than pattern led, created to produce statement wall murals and cultured velvet wall hangings, in addition to rolls of wallpaper, that work for both our commercial and residential clients.

You have had a number of very successful collaborations in the past, do you have a favourite project?

Our collaborations have all been such a privilege and each of them quite different from the other, so it would be hard to say. We do though have favourite designs from our collaborations, ones that have really stood the test of time. Oh and we’ve just won the ‘Best Modern Rug Design’ Award at Domotex 2020 for our Fresco Rug made in collaboration with Knots Rugs and Sir John Soanes Museum. We took a trip to Kathmandu to seeing them on the loom being hand made and that was a real highlight!