Right now, we're all spending more time at home. Home has always been where the heart is, and artworks help to transform a space into a place you love to spend time in. So as you slow down, take time to understand how each room in your home makes you feel. Explore our artworks and find one lifts your spirits now and you'll love forever.
So, you’ve fallen in love with one of our artworks, you've already measured up for the perfect spot, and you’re getting ready to commit to it. What are some of the practical considerations? Is professional installation required?
Our native birds are a source of great inspiration at Signarture, where Kookaburras, Sulphur Crested Cockatoos and Lorikeets regularly come and go from the giant tree outside the studio. Purchase any artwork from our Aviary collection during Bird Week and we'll donate 5% of the purchase price to Birdlife Australia in your name.
Pantone, the global colour authority, have just announced their 'Colour of the Year' for 2018: Ultra Violet 18-3838. Symbolic of the prevalent global culture, the colour of the year is an expression of the collective mood and attitude.
We are living in times that require inventiveness and imagination and, according to the Executive Director of the Pantone Colour Institute, Leatrice Eiseman, ultra violet communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us toward the future.
The colour is certainly provocative, and dominant. In an interior, it can easily overpower other elements and as such ultra violet requires careful coordination. It is perhaps best used as an accent colour, introduced through decorative elements such as artworks, so as not to overwhelm.
We took inspiration from nature, pairing the an ultra-violet hue with complementary deep oranges and citrus greens when creating new colourways for our popular 'Lhotse' design.
Fittingly, lhotse is a design from our Aura collection, which features organic forms in meditative arrangement. The color is often associated with mindfulness practices, which offer a higher ground to those seeking refuge from today’s over-stimulated world, and the use of purple-toned lighting in meditation spaces and other gathering places energizes the communities that gather there and inspire connection.
As Pantone state, as a color that can take you in so many directions, Ultra Violet makes a statement in any space, whether it’s one of tradition and elegance or contemporary boldness.
Colour is a powerful and emotive force, and we go to great lengths to provide clients with colour assurance because of the potential for disparity between the colour experienced on screen versus that experienced in reality.
Yet, ultimately, experiencing colour is in fact completely dependent on its physical, visual, artistic, and cultural context.
Despite an entire industry’s best efforts to name and codify colours, whether that be with the Pantone, RAL or NCS systems, they constantly shift in response to light and space. An environment can affect a colour as much as a colour affects our environments. It’s the reason why the paint you choose always looks different on a wall than it did on the paint chip.
Colour pigments interact with light and hence colours take on different hues depending on the time of the day and the brightness and temperature of light.
Our brains respond to stimuli produced when incoming light reacts with various cone cells in our eyes, but colours appear differently based on the other colours they’re paired with, the materials they’re used on, the shape of an object or space they are in, and the quality of light.
In the case of natural light, that means colours even change in hue over the course of a single day. A colour might look differently in the warm morning light than it does in the cooler light in the evening or, obviously, the dark. They might change subtly or drastically depending on the pigment.
A wonderful new exhibition at the Design Museum in London, this concept - known scientifically as metamersim - is wonderfully illustrated, not least by a series of multi-faceted vessels by Hella Jongerius.
The angled surfaces each differently capture and reflect the colours of the surfaces they are placed, so each panel appears to be a slightly different hue than its neighbour, even though they are all rendered in the same colour.
So, whilst we believe in providing you with the best colour assurance possible, you might like to reflect on the idea that colours can’t actually be controlled. As the exhibition designer Alex Newson says: “You can select colours based on expected performance, but they will usually surprise you. It’s better to be freer in how we can enjoy colour, and the idiosyncrasies and unexpected elements of colour.”