An Interview with: Neisha Crosland, award-winning textile designer

Earlier this year I was honoured to host a Q&A session with the pattern designer Neisha Crosland, whose work I have long admired, and whose wallpaper is in my bedroom. The event, which was held as part of Chelsea Design Week, was held to promote Neisha’s new range of tiles which are now available via Artisans of Devizes. During our chat I learnt how a wrong turn in a museum led to her current career and why her earliest memory of a coloured cocktail cigarette left a lasting impression on her designs.

The Jigsaw range of tiles, which are all unusually shaped as well as highly patterned, are in a range of beautiful sun-washed colours inspired variously by a synagogue in Florence, Renaissance paintings and Moroccan architecture. As Neisha said: “I have always worked on a square tile format and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to see what would happen if a pattern was designed to fit into an oblong or a diamond and if it would then create a secondary layer of interlocking pattern. To see if the same design would look different depending on the shape of the tile it was on.

“The overall mood I wanted to create was a sort of kaleidoscopic box of surprises, so I have explored angles and stars, castellated edges and overlapping lines while the colours came from the natural dusty nature of the encaustic tile that automatically gives any colour a sort of beautiful powdery look. There is pomato, turmeric, denim blue and the pink from the wall of a synagogue in Florence.”

The basic concept, she added, was that the collection should look as a newly laid Renaissance tiled floor would have looked when it was first done and not the faded look of an archeological find some 600 years later. “I didn’t want faded old colour but new old colour and I tried really hard to infuse it with that sensitivity.”

While working with the different shapes and patterns, Niesha was also very aware that the lines of grout would add another layer of pattern to the overall effect and, during our talk, we spoke about the idea of using coloured grout as a feature rather than trying to hide it and pretend it wasn’t there. So, in the picture above for example, you could tile with a chocolate brown or soft green to both blend in and create more pattern rather than breaking up the design with the traditional white. You could also, it’s worth pointing out, use a completely contrasting colour to make a real statement – Mapei has dozens of colours from bright to soft as well as gold and silver.

The range is suitable for use on walls and floors inside, but you can also use it as a decorative border with other, plainer tiles (just check they are the same thickness or you need to fiddle around with the thickness of the adhesive underneath).

So, leaving tiles there for the time being (and feast your eyes as you read) Neisha and I also chatted about her background and training. She has been painting and drawing since she was a small child but never thought she could make a career out of it, so she enrolled in a graphic design course at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts – “very fine art based with lots of drawing”.

But it was a wrong turn at a museum that led her to her final career choice in textile design.

“My eureka moment came when I was 22,” she said. “I took a wrong turn at the V&A and got lost in the Ottoman Empire textile gallery where I was suddenly surrounded by 15th and 16th century fabrics – dots, crescents, tulip heads, repeating on and on and in different colourways, using different techniques and all looking every bit as modern as the Russian avant-garde artists I so loved.

“I knew instantly that I’d made a mistake, that I should be studying textiles so I did a U-turn, missed my lecture and went directly to the Principle to ask if I could switch courses.”

As a child Neisha was always very aware of pattern and design and credits this to being short-sighted. “My early life was in close-up until I was about seven when I started wearing glasses so everything was a haze until I looked closely but when I did it was an amazing magnified view of the world.

“I remember getting up very close to a Fritillaria and as I looked closely I thought it was like a fairy had been to paint tiny checks on it overnight. Then I went inside and saw a painting of the very same flower that I had never noticed before and I learned later that it was a sketch for a Derby porcelain dinner service. From then on I was constantly on the look out for pattern and decoration on everything – shells, feathers etc. The idea that pattern from nature could then decorate manmade objects came later.”

Neisha also jokes that she herself was part of a repeat pattern as a child and that that may have had something to do with her designs: “I was the eldest of three sisters a year apart and my mother used to dress us identically in colourful, patterned clothes which she would buy on her travels as a stylist.

“Our hair was put up on our heads in tightly-pulled fountain-like ponytails – we were like three bounding cockatiels. I also remember as a small child sitting in the bath surrounded by mirrored tiles on three sides. Strange images of me went on and on and I remember thinking ‘where will it end?’

“I suppose the chaotic never-endingness of it might have been frightening to some, but I was intrigued. I’d spend ages trying to count them and taking great comfort in the escape of just looking and looking.”

It’s not just pattern for which Neisha has a very clear memory; colours too are etched on her mind.

“The first colour I remember is the Sobrani cocktail cigarettes in jade, tangerine and orange with their gold tips against a dark brown painted wall. That is actually my earliest memory of anything – I must have been about three or four and it was our living room. I often wonder if that is why I use gold in my work.”

As a creative who doesn’t have to conform to the steady drumbeat of 9-5, I wanted to know how Neisha structures her working day. She goes to bed late and doesn’t rise early is the first thing to note. But then meals are a distraction “so keen I am to get on”.

“I have my shot of  coffee and the fifth gear kicks in – eating breakfast is a bore. My home and studio are joined so I commute through the garage or, if the weather is nice, over the roof terrace. I usually have nine projects on the go at once which are all at different stages of evolution. Some might just be a sheet of blank paper on the drawing board, others are being handed over to mills and factories and others awaiting press shoots so the day starts in the studio with a catch-up.”

“Lunch might as well be a pill – I hate the momentum of the day being broken so I’m not a fan of going out. I do two gym sessions a week and I go out in the evening maybe three times a week to catch up with my sister, Charlotte Crosland, the interior designer, or with girlfriends. I love a good meal in a good restaurant with a white table cloth and good wine glasses. Or I go to the opera with my husband, who commutes to Dublin. My youngest boys have gone to university so sometimes it’s just a baked potato with beans for dinner.

“But I need at least five clear hours to really get something done so if I am alone I turn off the phone, the email and the computer as I need to get myself into a trance before the creative juices start to flow.”

And there we must leave her – in her pattern-induced trance. I’m off to eat the breakfast and lunch she doesn’t have time for as well as my own. Probably. You can see more of the tiles here  – let me know which are your favourites – and see more of Neisha’s work here.