Althea McNish: Designs without Borders

Abstract

Trinidad (plate 1), a printed furnishing textile designed by Althea McNish, was on display in London in 1960. Commissioned for the department store Heal's, the design was reproduced in black and white in the company's sales catalogues, among them Heal 's 1960 Fabric Collection and Heal's at the 1960 Ideal Home Exhibition. 1 In the latter, displayed behind a Danish teak table, Trinidad hangs in shallow folds that accentuate the repetitive pattern by lessening the gap between the repeated sections (plate 2). Colour is impossible to discern from the photograph, which exaggerates the contrast between light figure and dark ground. A close examination of the fabric reveals both the repeat and the figure/ground relationship to be more complex than the black-and-white photographs, and even most colour photographs, suggest. The colouring of the left and right side of the cloth is almost, but not quite, identical (plate 3 and plate 4). Very slight differences are visible, especially in the left-hand leaves at the top of the curved stem of one of the larger forms. These variations are caused by minor adjustments in the application of the pigments, which are intricately layered. At least four colours -dark blue, dark purple, a lighter, redder purple and black -are superimposed to constitute a richly textured background interrupted by lighter forms in which the white of the cloth is partially overlaid with green. Apart from the darkest purple, all of the background colours transgress the boundaries of the figure, within whose pale contours the blue, pinkish purple and black show up much more clearly than when they bleed over the edges to become almost invisible against the deep purple background. While the top layer of colour is black, when it blends into the purple any clear sense of depth is undermined. The white of the cloth appears to stand in front of the pigment on its surface, only to recede behind multiple layers of pigment that themselves merge back into the purple that appears to sit behind the white. Trinidad pushes at the boundaries of pattern; what is repeated is not quite repeated, and what appears to be distinct proves to be interwoven. Difference, and its limits, is a theme in Trinidad.Difference is also emphasized in much of the extant published criticism about the late Althea McNish, as I will demonstrate below. Born in Trinidad in 1924, McNish travelled to London to study graphic design and textiles in the 1950s. From 1957 she worked for leading manufacturers including Liberty's, Heal's and Hull Traders. She was hailed as the first black woman to succeed internationally as a textile designer. An article published in 1960 in the London magazine Tropic bore the title 'Althea McNish -Fabric Designer' and the subtitle 'The only coloured girl to have achieved prominence in this field'. 2 In 1964 Flamingo, another London-based periodical with a West Indian readership, published an article on McNish entitled 'Designing woman with a difference'. 3 Perhaps