Jessie de Salis
In the vibrant world of textile design, Jessie de Salis stands out with her gorgeous combination of hand-printed artistry and natural inspiration. From her Bristol roots to her Somerset barn studio, Jessie’s journey highlights the power of tactile creation in a digital age. Her designs, rich in color and delicate patterns, reflect a deep connection to the natural world and a reverence for traditional techniques. Join us as we discover Jessie’s creative process, exploring her passion for screen printing, her collaboration with cousin Alice, and the unique blend of nature and history that informs her stunning textiles.
Hello Jessie, how are you? Can you tell us a bit about yourself, who you are, where you’re based, and what you do?
How did your journey into screen printing begin, and what were the key moments that solidified it as your career path?
Hey Camille and Isabelle
My name is Jessie de Salis. I am a textile designer and a lover of colour and pattern. I have drawn and painted for as long as I can remember. As a small child I loved making a mess with cloth, paints, threads. Growing up, I noticed how much everyone’s lives are filled with textiles - their homes, their gardens, their clothes. I love making things that people can use and enjoy in their homes.
I’m from Bristol, and studied textiles in Falmouth then Manchester. Lockdown marked the start of my screen printing journey. When the pandemic hit I moved from London back to the South West. I spent some time in Cornwall living with my partner Jude and his family. Some of them had done printing, and I found a few screens gathering dust. Jude and I started playing around with screen printing. I totally fell in love with the process. It's incredibly satisfying to print your own fabric, with colours so fresh and alive. At the end of our time there we made an installation inspired by the Cornish landscape. Back home in Bristol I set up a little business. I started to get commissions for curtains and upholstery and the business grew. My cousin Alice joined me, and we moved into a barn studio in Somerset.
Your designs are known for their vibrant colors and intricate patterns. Can you describe how you translate your creative visions into tangible fabric designs?
Drawing is at the start of everything I do. I find it so hard to design without sketching first. I create a collection of paintings and drawings and then make them into paper cut outs. When you hand print you're really limited in the number of colours you can use. It’s tricky to make 5 colours into 2! Sometimes I make the design from paper cut outs in 1 or 2 colours that I stick directly onto transparent acetate. I pop them onto a screen and start doing small sample tests. Later I enlarge everything… a finished screen will be 90cm by 140cm. Screen printing requires so many tests at every stage. Colour tests, ink tests, fabric tests, how the colours looks with each other, on different background colours, etc. So a lot of prep time is required. The Bauhaus school had a great teaching technique… they would give students coloured cards to help work out colour palettes. A dark blue next to a white will pop, but next to dark red will look muted. The way colours work is so interesting.
What is it about the handcrafted nature of your work that you find most rewarding, particularly in today’s digital age?
It’s very old school. People love to point out that this would be a lot easier on a laptop. But it’s a great feeling working with my hands and working physically. And doing everything by hand makes me a much better designer. Digital technologies are wonderful, but I’m such a maximalist it works for me to have technical limitations in place, making me really think about what works and why. When you’re hand printing, every colour is separately layered. Every colour matters.
What were the most difficult skills to aquire when learning the screen printing process?
It’s a long list! Working out repeats. Working out what to buy, what equipment I’d need. Working out what inks to use and what fabrics to print on. How to get inks to dry in a barn in February… all of it!
Actually the most important qualities you need if you’re starting a craft business, are patience and resilience. Things go wrong, you’re faced with obstacles you’d never realized existed. It’s taken me years to learn that it's OK if things don’t go to plan and you have to start over.
How has collaborating with your cousin, Alice Jacoby, who specializes in natural dyes, enriched your creative process?
Well, it’s stimulating and fun to work with other people. Alice is very creative with dyes and pigment. The first thing she did when she joined the studio was make beautiful colour charts of our printing inks, detailing pigment recipes to use on different textiles. This has been so satisfying, and is something I find hard and hadn’t got round to myself! We have an ongoing project to create a range of screen printing inks that are entirely natural. So far we’ve tested indigos, madder and weld. It’s a dream of ours to create an extensive collection of naturally printed fabrics and wallpapers.
The changing patterns of the natural world are a significant source of your design inspiration. Can you give us some specific examples of how you observe and translate those natural patterns into your textile designs?
I love to make projects based on the seasons. In my Spring project I looked at plants indigenous to the UK that emerge from February to May… first it’s snowdrops, then crocuses, primroses, daffodils, tulips, lilies of the valley. I love plants of the pea family like Vetch, with their delicate tendrils and leaves, sweet pink flowers, and then beautiful ripe peas in a pod. My vetch design came out of these observations.
Considering that you work in a studio surrounded by nature, how does the immediate environment influence the colors and forms that appear in your prints?
I love nature and I love things to look natural. In my Somerset studio it’s wonderful to be surrounded by the seasons and the countryside. I notice which flowers are out, when trees blossom, when the swallows have arrived and fly off to Africa… and in my chilly studio I’m very aware of the temperature rising… and falling again!
When you’re designing, do you focus on recreating specific natural elements, or are you more interested in capturing the essence or feeling of nature’s patterns?
I try to think about the characteristics and energy of a plant. Is it twisted and winding, is it solid and straight? I’m not aiming for botanical accuracy… for me it’s about seeing and feeling.
What are some of the recurring themes or historical periods that inspire your design aesthetic?
I love the Bauhaus art movement, with its inspiring approach to teaching the arts. For them, design was a very serious business, even a sacred endeavour. And I love looking at the ancients... designs and patterns from ancient Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your design work and business?
My biggest dream is to set up a proper textile print studio/ gallery space in Bristol. My current studio is wonderful, the building is a barn we have created into a studio. One day I would love to expand, it would be amazing to make a place that I could share with others, do community projects where art and design can be shared.
What advice would you give to somebody that wants to start a hand printing textile business?
Don’t do it, digital printing is so much easier. Haha, just kidding. Prep and plan to a T - the neater and better the prep the better the prints. Give it time for everything, learning to print, making designs and mixing colours. Have fun, experiment. It's a glorious process.
Jessie de Salis @jessiedesalis
Explore her shop www.jessiedesalis.com