Faversham Life
Faversham Life
Words Justin Croft Photographs Helen Adams
Helen Adams
This week Faversham Life visited Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles, a superb and thought-provoking new exhibition at Walthamstow’s William Morris Gallery. A sumptuous feast for the eyes for those who love Liberty style, the exhibition has been conceived in partnership with Liberty Fabrics to celebrate the design house’s 150th anniversary and to highlight the contributions of women textile designers.
Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles
Liberty, with its landmark Tudor-revival building beside London’s Oxford Circus, has benefitted from the work of a long list of famous British textile designers, including the great William Morris himself, but also the Scottish Arts and Crafts illustrator, Jessie Marion King and more recent artists such as Susan Collier and the Trinidad-born Althea McNish. While the firm has often celebrated some of these names, many of their artists were commissioned as freelancers, selling their designs to appear under the Liberty trademark without their names appearing on the finished product. Many remain anonymous beyond the company archives and one of the intentions of the William Morris Gallery’s exhibition is to recover as many of these names as possible and to give credit where credit is so overwhelmingly due.
Helen Claude print on Liberty Tana Lawn cotton
One such designer is Faversham’s own Helen Adams. She produced many designs for Liberty in the 1990s and was recently surprised to get a message out of the blue from Roisin Inglesby, a historian and writer who co-curated the Women in Print exhibition, asking whether she was the Helen Adams featured in the show. Helen asked for more details and confirmed that the gorgeous paisley print marketed by Liberty as ‘Claude’ was indeed her work. Created over 30 years ago, the cotton print is a nineties twist on the classic Victorian paisley prints loved by Liberty’s very first customers in the Victorian era. From its origins, paisley was a distinctively British phenomenon, appropriating Persian block-printed motifs seen on Kashmir scarves, while actually being manufactured in the cotton mills of Paisley in Scotland from the 1830s. It’s a pattern that has gone in and out of favour with the public, notably having a psychedelic moment in the sixties and early seventies. Twenty years later Helen Adams updated it brilliantly, her design paying homage to another non-western textile tradition, that of the ikat fabrics of south-east Asia. The result, ‘Claude’ has been produced by Liberty in a variety of colourways and now appears in their current Women in Print range as ‘Helen Claude’.
Helen Claude on show
Helen told me that unexpectedly finding her work in the Liberty show has been emotional. Like many hopeful young artists, her training (first at Winchester College of Art then the Royal College of Art) culminated in a degree show to which curators and industry buyers were invited. At her show, a note was left for her to make contact with one of the Liberty buyers. A meeting was arranged and the firm ultimately purchased a number of her designs. Helen recalls being too shy and too naïve to ask much about terms. In line with practice at the time, and even to this day, a fabric designer simply sold the artwork with no right or expectation to be named. An impoverished student, trying to make ends meet in London, of course she was thrilled to have been selected by such an important name. She describes her very first trials taken up to Liberty for approval. Too poor to buy new paper stocks, she found herself repurposing panels of woodchip paper lifted from the walls of her tiny flat opposite the Albert Hall, creatively working with the paper’s unusual texture. That proved to be a hit, with other designs following, followed by a line using wood laminate paper, which Helen made her own by creating meticulously painted arrangements, usually floral, reminiscent of Japanese block printing.
Helen Adams. Parrots. Watercolour on wood laminate paper
More work with Liberty kept Helen busy as a freelance designer for several years. Eager to experience New York she then worked in the States for two years, bringing her distinctive eye to a host of American fashion brands. Returning to England she was offered a position with Laura Ashley, before eventually returning to freelancing, this time with Johnnie Boden. Anyone who has worn a floral print from one of these firms is quite likely to have been wearing one of her designs. Increasingly, Helen found herself being asked to design with the help of computers, about which she still has strong reservations. Looking at her notebooks and sketch pads it’s easy to see why.
Helen Adams. Watercolour on wood laminate paper. A nod to William Morris’s early ‘Trellis’ designs
Her practice, in all its colour and detail is based entirely on the skill of the hand and the sureness of the eye — revelling in detail and rooted in the hard-won skill of judging pattern repeats beyond the margins of the drawing. As a busy designer, Helen doesn’t always have copies of work which went into production, it being the property of the firm she was working for at the time, but the original patterns she brings to show me are, without any exaggeration, breathtaking.
Helen Adams. Album sketch, oil pastel on black paper.
Helen’s early work has sometimes felt a distant memory for her, she admits, having encountered serious health issues in recent years, first a brain haemorrhage, followed by a cancer diagnosis. Yet she has bravely and remarkably put both behind her and is now creating new and inspirational designs beyond the strictures of textiles. She says it has been an extraordinary quirk of fate that it is precisely now that her work has been exhibited in a landmark exhibition. Travelling to see ‘Helen Claude’ in the show and being invited to Liberty’s, as well as finding her work shown alongside pieces by women who she studied with at college, have brought back intense memories. It’s a serendipitous intersection of all the interlocking circles of an artistic life. It has also, rightly, been an affirmation of the work she has achieved. Most importantly, it has brought new inspiration, and it’s clear that pages are already being filled in the chapters of an artistic story to come.
Text: Justin Croft. Photographs: Helen Adams
Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles is on now until Sunday, 21 June 2026
FREE admission. Suggested donation of £5.
William Morris Gallery, Lloyd Park, Forest Road, London E17 4PP.
The Gallery is free and open to all. Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 5pm. A 12-15 minute walk or a short bus ride from Walthamstow Central station on the Victoria Line and National Rail.
