Annie Trevillian has 21 years experience as a designer and screen printer of cloth and paper in Canberra. She is a practicing professional textile artist, designer, maker and educator.

The inspiration for Trevillian’s artwork comes from her collection of mid twentieth century fabrics, frocks and objects. In this body of work she was inspired by the shape, colour and form of vases and wall vases. It is based on vase/body images, which reference human scale, interior/exterior and patterning.

At the design stage Trevillian experiments in the crossover of drawing, painting, and printing with digital imagery and computer textile and graphic design programs.

In 1994 she became interested in the printing and colouring of fabrics with dyes and together with Jill Pettifer produced “Bleach, Buckle and Burn: Chemical Treatments of Fabric” - a comprehensive manual and information resource. This has been incorporated into the ANU School of Art Textiles curriculum.

Trevillian’s latest work involves technological experimentation in direct digital printing on textiles with chemical treatments of fabrics. The possibilities of unlimited colours in a one off image or as a conventional textile pattern in repeat to any length, only limited by the width of the available printer, the dyes and pigments used and the base cloth, is an exciting challenge.

 

My early training as a painter at art school placed a strong emphasis on life drawing and painting from natural forms. My progression into textile design made perfect sense based on this training.

Screenprinting on textiles involves skills in the areas of drawing and illustration, artwork design and layout, colour separations, stencil preparation, colour mixing and matching, registration and printing. I have always been attracted to the idea of reproducing images in multiples as in repeat printed metreage.

My initial attempts of putting a design into repeat was all done by my painter’s eye - I was unaware that there were ready made systems for repeat pattern. But I also loved the idea of one-off motifs on a large scale.

I use chemical treatments of fabrics to produce richly coloured hand dyed and printed velvets, which have had the colour removed (discharge) or replaced (illumination) or part of the fibre removed (burnout).

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