“I call it a punked-up version of history,” says Maxine Hall as she admires her dramatic wallpaper, lining the red-carpeted stairway of her Derby home. Viewed from a distance it has an abstract feel, but draw close and intriguing elements from the past emerge from the velvety-black depths. There’s the famous carved imp which peers down inside Lincoln Cathedral, a “netsuke deity”, a flash of butterfly wing and a bird skull, glowing like relics revealed on a river bank.
This painterly effect draws on digital skills which Hall has developed since studying photography at the University of Westminster in the late 80s. “I was their first student to specialise in digital imagery. I sensed that technology was going to change everything.” After college she worked as a fine artist and university lecturer until, in 2012, she “took the mid-life plunge” and set up her home furnishings business, Blackpop. “I’d always worked digitally, mixing graphics and photography. It struck me that wallpaper and textiles would be the perfect canvases.” A first collection of “elegantly distressed, non-chocolate-boxy” designs led to commissions from shops and restaurants. In 2015 a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, inspired by X-ray imagery of the museum’s Tudor portraits, won a best product award at Decorex.
All the designs begin life in her studio, tucked under the eaves of the terraced house she bought 17 years ago with her partner, Paula Moss, an artist and Blackpop’s studio director. “The arts and crafts bones of the house appealed to our imagination,” says Moss. “And it was all we could afford at the time,” laughs Hall. Read more
This painterly effect draws on digital skills which Hall has developed since studying photography at the University of Westminster in the late 80s. “I was their first student to specialise in digital imagery. I sensed that technology was going to change everything.” After college she worked as a fine artist and university lecturer until, in 2012, she “took the mid-life plunge” and set up her home furnishings business, Blackpop. “I’d always worked digitally, mixing graphics and photography. It struck me that wallpaper and textiles would be the perfect canvases.” A first collection of “elegantly distressed, non-chocolate-boxy” designs led to commissions from shops and restaurants. In 2015 a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, inspired by X-ray imagery of the museum’s Tudor portraits, won a best product award at Decorex.
All the designs begin life in her studio, tucked under the eaves of the terraced house she bought 17 years ago with her partner, Paula Moss, an artist and Blackpop’s studio director. “The arts and crafts bones of the house appealed to our imagination,” says Moss. “And it was all we could afford at the time,” laughs Hall. Read more