Interview/Q&A
GF Smith Interviews: Hilary Grant
We chat to the textile design studio, based on the Northerly Scottish islands of Orkney, about the highs and lows of living and working on an archipelago and where they turn for inspiration.
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How did Hilary Grant start?
It started as a hobby really. I had been working for other designers after graduating university, but we came back to Dundee in 2010 and I was working part time in arts education in a museum, as well as working in cafes and restaurants. I started making scarves on a domestic knitting machine, as a way to keep my toes dipped in design work. I sold everything in person at first, at craft fairs and pop ups. After a while I started to approach some shops and galleries and built up a little network of stockists.
After a year or so, I started working with a textile mill in the Scottish Borders, which opened up the possibility of using much more sophisticated knit constructions, and allowed me to focus on all the other things you need to do to run a business. We’ve been working with them ever since.
My partner Rob then officially joined the business. We’d been collaborating here and there over the years, and we had always been involved to some degree in each others’ creative work. He trained in architecture and one especially busy year we decided to start officially working and designing together, which added a different dimension to our work.
You are based in Orkney; tell us how you draw inspiration from your environment.
It’s not something we necessarily do consciously, I think we’re just steeped in it at this point! We’ve always liked the idea of living and working from somewhere that might be considered ‘remote’, while attempting to create work which felt universal or international. But people still say all the time that they can see Orkney in the colours we use.
The landscape here is constantly changing, and there is always something interesting to observe particularly in colour and light and the way it interacts with the the shape of the landscape, the coastline and all the textures from plants. There’s an interesting scale to Orkney. What you see day to day here either looks massive, with huge big vistas of empty land and sky, or tiny details, like grasses and plant life. That’s a dynamic we noticed is often reflected in our designs too. We’re drawn towards patterns which are engaging at a very small scale, built up of tiny shapes and motifs, but there is often a much bigger idea or effect that you only see when you look at the piece from a distance.
Where else do you source inspiration?
Our tastes are pretty varied but I think we’re often drawn to creative work which isn’t easily categorised, and which feels a bit contradictory. Like early Scandinavian Modern architecture and design, which blends the originality of Modernism with natural materials and craftsmanship, and with a strangeness that feels like it belongs to the world of tradition and craft. That sense of strangeness is something we’ve been trying to embrace in recent years in our own work.
Tell us about the highs and lows of living and working on an archipelago?
There's a lot of freedom here, you feel like you have the whole place to roam around and explore, which we did a lot of especially in the last year. I think it's all about how you look at things – in some ways you could feel a bit “cut off” from big exhibitions and cultural institutions and being part of a more central creative scene, but you are also at the centre of somewhere else. We're lucky that we live somewhere that other people want to visit, so before the pandemic, there have often been nice opportunities to meet up with people I've met through Instagram, or creative folk who are up here as part of a project etc.
I think we’ve also found it beneficial to our creativity to be cloistered away too.
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How do you translate your ideas in to textiles?
Our design process is quite spontaneous and intuitive, so ideas for us usually emerge as we work. We don’t often set out to achieve a specific idea or effect. More often we’ll notice something interesting is starting to happen and we’ll steer the design in that direction. We might then start afresh, with more intention, but the ideas will generally have come out of the design process itself.
Knit can be quite a rigid and unforgiving medium if you are trying to translate something which you’ve sketched freehand, or an image in your head. So we take those limitations as the starting point for our design process, and construct patterns from the stitch up.
You use environmentally friendly dyes in your textiles, tell us about what sustainability means to you and your craft?
We think it's just part of good design and it's always been a foundation of the business, and our own personal ethos that people who make things are paid fairly, treated fairly and things are made to last and look good over time.
If it remains on the planet for years after it remains useful, or can't be easily broken down and repurposed I don't think that is an example of a good product.
The fibres we use are shipped in raw form to the mill in Scotland once a year and they are dyed using Global Organic Standard dyes.
What three items from your studio could you not live without?
An easy one! Computer, drawing tablet and my Marimekko mug (preferably full of tea!).
What are you favourite papers from the Collection and why?
We love the Neenah Environment papers – and specifically use the Birch 90gsm for gift wrapping our larger pieces – I love that the paper has a subtle fleck and it compliments the knitwear so well. Our swing tags are currently made by Glasgow Press using Colorplan Ice White 700gsm.