Trails
Turkey Red
Celebrating the vibrant heritage of Burnbrae Dye Works and the Turkey Red textile industry, the vinyl window installation at Milngavie Heritage Centre transforms the building with colour and pattern. The local Turkey Red industry flourished throughout the 19th Century, employing around 600 skilled workers to create extensive lengths of meticulously printed fabric using complex repeat patterns and a striking colour palette.Taking the textile sample books held at the National Museum of Scotland as a starting point, through an experimental and laborious process, shapes and patterns have been extracted from the archives and transformed into new designs. Working between tangible, hand-made collages to computer generated graphic drawings, Rachel highlights the shift in textile production – from intricate hand-printed patterns to mass-produced digital prints – whilst creating more organic shapes and textures that express the subtle variation and movement within cotton material. Similarly to the Turkey red printing process, the artwork has been constructed from distinct layers of colour, which blend in their transparencies when viewed from the interior space; temporal patterns are cast through the windows, shifting and fading with the changes in sunlight. Despite the limited records of original designs created at Burnbrae itself, the artwork imagines how the patterns made in Milngavie could once have looked, magnified.