Held at Firstsite in Colchester in winter 2012–2013, this exhibition explored the history and legacy of Hammer Prints Ltd, a commercial venture established by the artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson in 1954 as a vehicle for their self-declared “attack on the craft field using the silk-screen as the media to be exploited”. Working in partnership, the artists created a series of patterns and designs which were applied to textiles, wallpapers, ceramics and homewares.
We worked directly with original acetates, and archival Hammer Prints materials, to restore and reproduce the patterns for the exhibition in their original colourways and at their original scale. Taking Firstsite’s sweeping curves, high ceilings and expansive areas of wall as a blank canvas, we reproduced the original wallpapers to cover the walls of the gallery entrance and create a striking celebration of their colour and scale. For the main curved wall of the Firstsite building, Henderson & Paolozzi’s own experiments with magnification and enlargements have been echoed in a series of enlarged graphic cutouts taken from their Sea Beasts designs, clustered acrossthe surface to draw visitors through the building to the galleries themselves.
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Alongside the exhibition, we produced a range of limited-edition merchandise for Firstsite using patterns from the Hammer Prints archive, reimagining the prints’ original applications by modern means and returning them to their original context — the home.
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Exhibition Graphics, Printed Material and Publication
As the inaugural show at Firstsite, Colchester Camulodunum questioned how history is recovered, represented and re-enacted. Works by international artists were juxtaposed with pieces from the local museum’s collection. Taking reference from iron age coins, Roman typography, and archaeological surveys, we produced a publication documenting the exhibition alongside photographs, posters, and artefacts from Colchester’s colourful history. Swiss binding paired with a gold foiled cover set off this idea of the combination of old and new.
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