Manchester-born, internationally-formed designer Patricia Shea has spent a lifetime developing a colour-saturated, maximalist pattern practice that began with watercolour on paper in New York and now exists across fabric, wallcoverings and digital print on demand.
Patricia Shea did not set out to develop a unique style.
“Developing a unique style has been a happenstance exploration and not a goal,” she says.
That quality of going with the flow rather than designing toward a predetermined end has shaped a practice that now spans decades, continents and an enormous range of surfaces, and produced work that is instantly recognisable.
The path began in Manchester, passed through a life-changing move to New York, and grew through six years creating textile designs and silhouettes for bodywear before expanding into fashion, ceramics, tabletop, book publishing and paper products as a freelancer. The technical approach has remained consistent throughout: hand-drawn and painted work in watercolour or colour pencil on paper, married with Photoshop’s capacity for layering, repetition and colour saturation. The resulting style sits somewhere that analogue making and digital possibility rarely manage to reach together: luscious, dense, kaleidoscopic in its mixing and mismatching of disparate elements, patterns and items to create visual depth and intrigue.
When print on demand for fabric and wall coverings arrived, it changed everything. For the first time, Shea could be her own design director, merchandiser and marketing manager, free to create the work she wanted to see without following trends or working to a client’s brief. The seamless repeat, which she describes as her true love, became the primary canvas. The result is an ongoing body of work that continues to develop through intuition and immersion rather than strategy.
She returned to the UK in 2018 and has since been building what she calls her creative tribe, redirecting artistically as new opportunities have emerged. The practice, now decades in the making, shows no sign of arriving anywhere conclusive. It is still going with the flow.
Patricia Shea is a designer based in the UK, originally from Manchester. Her work is available as fabric and wallcovering through print on demand.
ARTIST LINKS
@designconfections
spoonflower.com/profiles/patriciasheadesigns
Digital print patterns and watercolour illustration. All works by Patricia Shea.
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