This exhibition, held at Firstsite in Colchester, explored the history and legacy of Hammer Prints Ltd, a venture established by 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 designs which were applied to textiles, wallpapers, ceramics and homewares.
We worked directly with artwork acetates and archival materials to restore and reproduce the patterns for the exhibition, in their original colours and at their original scale. Taking Firstsite’s expansive walls as a blank canvas, we reproduced the original wallpapers to cover the walls of the gallery entrance. For the main curved wall of the building, Henderson & Paolozzi’s own experiments with magnification and enlargements were echoed in a series of graphic cutouts from their Sea Beasts series, which drew visitors through the building to the galleries themselves.
