REVIEW May 2025 ‘Annie Garnett: The Alchemy of Colour’ at Blackwell - the Arts and Crafts house

Kirsty Jukes

Art historian and writer Kirsty Jukes reviews ‘Annie Garnett: The Alchemy of Colour’ at Blackwell - the Arts and Crafts house, Bowness-on-Windermere. Curated by Naomi Gariff, this summer-long celebration provides visitors with the perfect chance to learn more about Annie Garnett (1864-1942), a pioneering textile designer, entrepreneur and key figure in the British Arts & Crafts Movement. Garnett’s work can be seen here alongside that of contemporary artist and designer, Jacqui Symons, with the exhibition exploring both artists' use of plant-based dyes and natural materials. Viewers also have access to material such as hand painted watercolours, letters and Autochrome Lumiere plate photographs from Lakeland Arts’ Annie Garnett Collection and Archive. ‘Annie Garnett: The Alchemy of Colour’ is on view until Sunday 5 October 2025.

“It is with the freedom of a painter laying on pigment that Miss Garnett manipulates her medium of polychromatic flora, often most ingeniously massing tints and shades.” (1)

Annie Garnett’s three-acre garden at Fairfield, Bowness-on-Windermere is just one inspiration for her beautiful handmade fabrics which are treasured for their rich colourings and stylised shapes. Alongside the pleasantly pastoral surroundings of nineteenth and twentieth century Lakeland, her garden’s carefully cultivated floriculture inspired in the artist a pronounced love of colour. Just some of the plant life she chose to grow includes*

These saplings and sprays that lined beds and borders in her wildlife haven were selected and tended to by the artist. Many rare and exotic flowers were chosen not only for their delightful visual and olfactory appeal, but also their physical properties for use in dyeing methods. Using autochromes, a pre-1918 photographic plate technique developed at the Lumière factory in Lyon, France, Garnett would send images she had taken of her garden directly to her dye maker Thomas Wardle, a Staffordshire based artisan who worked with William Morris. They would colour match textiles based on her exacting specifications resulting in a truly unique set of fabrics for use in her work. An archive of these images, available to view online here, still hold their vibrancy providing a chromatic step back into the heady paradise of Garnett’s home and work.

The same variegation is present in the archive of silk skeins and delicate watercolours around the ‘The Alchemy of Colour’ which go a long way to show just how focused on experimentation, quality and care Garnett was throughout her career. Born to an upper-middle-class family in 1864, the artist spent most of her life in Lakeland and was a key creator in the British Arts & Crafts Movement. She had little education and no formal art training, learning what she knew from architecture, art and craft books in the family home library. This was the norm for women of the time who were encouraged into domestic pursuits rather than taking up any outgoing interests. By all accounts, Garnett was a strong-minded entrepreneur with a flair for arts, nature and sciences who would not be curtailed by societal expectations.

Her father made the acquaintance of John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic and social commentator who lived in the Lake District at the end of his life. He was integral to the revival of crafts in the local area which included embroidery, lace work and weaving, all talents of Garnett. From 1872 he involved himself in the local community and encouraged people to learn pastimes that were new to them (2). Residents including his housekeeper Marion Twelves set up their own workshop as a result of Ruskin's influence. By 1891, inspired by this new local movement Garnett set up her own enterprise ‘The Windermere Industry’, later known as ‘The Spinnery’ in an outbuilding at home. She was encouraged by a gift of solidarity in the form of six spinning wheels and six months financing rumoured to be from Ruskin. Work the artist and her team created here over the years stayed true to the principles of her mentor and the arts and crafts movement in that there was zero room for industrialisation or intervention (3).

At its height, Garnett’s business employed up to one hundred workers and was responsible for innovating in the design and manufacture of new materials. She experimented with her fabrics, using unusual dyes from her garden, adapting very modern, stylised forms from nature and was one of the first to have metals woven through her fabrics (namely combining silk and aluminium). Garnett also tried to breed her own silkworms (to various degrees of success) and showed constant dedication to excelling in her chosen craft. Through her diaries, letters and books such as ‘Flowers and Colour Schemes in a Westmorland Garden’ the artist presented her meticulous attention to detail through an archival approach to artistry.

Although appreciated in her working life, including being patronised by Queen Alexandria to create ‘Fritillary’ silk fabric (now part of the V&A collection) and having her patterns sold by Liberty, Garnett’s pace slowed upon the advent of the First World War. She did try to resurrect her success in the interwar years, but it was never the same again and she died in 1942 with little public remembrance to be found anywhere. Blackwell’s collection of beautifully cared for woven and embroidered textiles from Garnett’s height of power are a testament to her talent and efforts. There is much to see, and it is presented in a visually pleasing way, aligned with the practice of Garnett and the overall ethos of Blackwell. To see these thoughtful creations surrounded by her archive rights the wrong of a lack of obituary and is an essential part of the ongoing work taking place to rehabilitate her name as a scholar of her craft.

Alongside the extensive archive and work of Annie Garnett are a series of commissioned installations by contemporary artist Jacqui Symons. Using Garnett’s approach to creating fabrics, Symons has colour matched silks from the archive using a series of self-made plant-based dyes. At Slow Lane Studios in Manchester, she experiments with creating coloured pigments for use in her work. Symons' environmentally aware practice originally began in 2018 as she explored natural dyes and printmaking. She has since moved on to a process of almost scientific analysis of raw materials which is visually reminiscent as presented at the exhibition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. In the late 18th century, German mineralogist Abraham Werner devised a classification of colours with descriptions and examples of where to find them in the natural world. Scottish painter Patrick Syme further enhanced the book by painting swatches which matched the descriptions adding a visual element to the text. Symons’ pigment library and swatches continue on in the tradition of Werner, Syme and Garnett by taking their lessons and employing more contemporary, less intrusive means of production such as avoiding living creatures and their eggs for example. She hopes to eventually cultivate a ‘closed circle practice’ in which she uses only the materials grown by and for herself.

Her work highlights the naturally occurring abundance of colour that can be cultivated in a garden or foraged locally in nature, very much like her predecessor Garnett. The range of tones, both subtle and satisfying, on display in ‘The Alchemy of Colour’ are widely sourced from plants, flowers, berries, trees, minerals and earth. She is currently developing a plant pigment library and a pigment garden as a reference and resource for other artists, part of which can be seen at Blackwell during the exhibition run. Coiled skeins of silk, created to match colours found in original textiles from Garnett’s self-established and run business, the Spinnery, are displayed hanging in rows above their archival counterparts laid out in vitrines below. The attention to detail here is mesmerising, made even more impressive by Symons’ colour matching records which keep count of the subtle changes made to samples including notes on how this was achieved. Manipulating differences in shade and tone by overdyeing, mordanting and modifying with metals and alkalis blends the arts and sciences in a clear crossover of methodologies.

I was lucky enough to catch up with Symons to ask more about her practice and about being commissioned for this project -

Kirsty Jukes (KJ): As part of the project, you recreated colours found in the Spinnery's textiles for a range of beautiful naturally dyed silks. Did you have any clues as to where you should start for this piece of detective work?

Jacqui Symons (JS): I didn’t really have any clues around how the colours had been created, other than experience, referencing my own extensive sample collection and liaising with other natural dye experts.  I did a fair amount of research into Thomas Wardle and his Leek-based dye house, where William Morris also learnt about natural dyes, alongside using my existing knowledge of the history of natural dyes, what would have been used at the time and when synthetic dyes were invented, which was less than 200 years ago.  It’s interesting that there were no yellows in the collection and in one of the Wardle books I read, it refers to the fact that Thomas Wardle struggled to find a good, lightfast yellow among the natural dyes.  What makes this more fascinating is that Weld (Reseda luteola) is a common plant in this country and is one of the most lightfast natural yellows available. I wonder why Weld wasn’t used - perhaps there wasn’t a commercial grower of the amounts necessary, perhaps it was too expensive or just not in favour at the time.

KJ: What are your favourite natural materials to work with when creating dyes? What pigments do they create?

JS:  Madder is my favourite dye plant to work with. The most common variety in the UK is Rubia tinctorum, a perennial plant that many cultivated for its roots though these can take three years to develop into a useful size.  The roots contain alizarin alongside many other colourants which makes it possible to achieve colours ranging from red, orange and brown through to pink, salmon and purple depending on how the dye is used.  Natural dyes, in which the colourant is soluble, can also be made into pigments, which are insoluble colourants - think powder paint or the dry pigment used to make oil paints.  This means that a natural dye liquid can be made into a dry powder called a lake pigment which is far more shelf stable than a dye. These pigments can be used for painting or printing, making watercolour paints, printmaking inks, oil-based paints, pastel crayons and wax crayons for example.

KJ: And finally, tell me more about your plant pigment reference library and how you choose what to include.

JS: The Plant Pigment Reference Library is an ongoing work in progress which documents colour obtained from plants. The collection primarily contains lake pigments but also includes dried and ground plant parts, pollen, dried ink and pigment extractions. It is an attempt to highlight the variety of colour that can be extracted from plants but also aims to document our natural world, using natural colour as a means of communication and as a site-specific record of plants. Each of the 182 (so far) pigments has a reference number that records plant type, method of extraction, source of plant, location of plant and date.  The 45 pigments shown in the exhibition were chosen to showcase the wide-ranging colour achievable from plants but were also chosen for their colour longevity and lightfastness.  I haven’t yet exhibited the complete collection which is growing ever bigger - hopefully one day I will get the chance to!

One of the main lessons from this exhibition for me was its relation, past and present through both artists on display, to our current battle with material wastage and fast fashion. Pollution is intrinsically linked to the lack of value placed on belongings in the modern world. This is not least because textile dyes, along with many industrial pollutants, are highly toxic and potentially carcinogenic and related to environmental degradation and various diseases in animals and humans (4). Columbia Climate School reported in 2021 that the global fashion industry alone is responsible for 10 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and 20 percent of global wastewater and uses more energy than the aviation and shipping sectors combined. This shows no sign of slowing down in the four years since then. Dyeing processes for fabrics, which use toxic chemicals, are responsible for 17 to 20 percent of global industrial water pollution. Seventy-two toxic chemicals have been found in the wastewater from textile dyeing (5). This wastewater poses ecotoxicity and health risks to the environment by decomposing soil and water and endangering local fauna and flora (6). Considering the beautiful colours in Garnett’s images and Symon’s plant pigment samples alongside the beautiful landscape surrounding the Blackwell, it is hard to reconcile these facts.

Fast manufacturing processes are popular for several reasons, not least the cost of handmade, slow fashion being out of reach for many. Having the ability to take time over both honing a craft and buying the work of craftspeople is unfortunately mostly reserved for the privileged. A widespread shift in this situation lies in many changes taking place. These include a slowdown in the rate of production for everyone under capitalist systems leaving time for all people to pursue a slower pace of life. This would provide individuals with more time for slower looking and handcrafting creating a decrease in the need to urgently buy goods in the few spare hours we have each day.

Some may suggest a simple change in habits is all that is needed; however, I think it is much deeper than this and lies in both education and emancipation. Retailers also hold responsibility for focusing on quality of materials more widely, trends should then follow and the requirement for fast fashion would diminish. The idea of returning to rural beginnings and embracing a simpler, slower existence is something that really appeals to me at this moment in time. Making materials in collaboration with traditional artisans and learning from the precious lessons of indigenous communities can and does produce results that address environmental, social and economic facets of sustainability. Why would we not aim for this over our current situation? Our fight for better living conditions and equal rights must also include a better way to exist on the planet.

Natural processes are much less harmful for the environment as they do not contain harsh chemicals, are much less resource intensive and less wasteful of water. Up until the point that synthetic dyes were invented, natural dyeing was one of the only ways to get colour into life's accoutrements. Indigenous knowledge in the form of word-of-mouth generational stories, written histories or discoveries made at archaeological digs tell us about the many cultures across the world who used natural dyes in their everyday lives. In Ancient Britain for example, woad, weld and madder were used to create blue, yellow and red dyes respectively. Retracing our folkloric traditions and using them in the present is a great way to connect with our history and environment more respectfully. There is a plethora of ways in which plants can help humans aside from colouring fabrics, we just need to stop and look. Don’t miss your chance to have your visual cortex well and truly stimulated and to learn new ways of living in harmony with the planet from one of Lakeland’s great artisans.

‘Annie Garnett: The Alchemy of Colour’ runs until Sunday 5 October 2025 at Blackwell - the Arts and Crafts house.

Entry included with house admission. Pre book tickets online at blackwell.org.uk.

*Colours matched directly from original autochrome plates taken by Garnett.

Footnotes

(1)     The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Lake District : a social history : Brunton, Jennie : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

(2)     John Ruskin - Lakeland Arts

(3)     https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/magazines/lancashire/22618667.annie-garnett---woman-wove-wonders

(4)     https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/06/10/why-fashion-needs-to-be-more-sustainable/

(5)     Classification and impact of synthetic textile dyes on Aquatic Flora: A review - ScienceDirect

(6)     Wastewater generation and treatment by various eco-friendly technologies: Possible health hazards and further reuse for environmental safety

This review is supported by Lakeland Arts