For fashion designer Karen Walker, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki has always been a place to escape the everyday – ‘a portal that never fails to take you into disparate eras, seasons, places and moods.’ The designer’s latest collection with the Gallery – a trio of lustrous silk scarves – embraces this escapism, creating irresistible summer daydreams inspired by works of art.
Each scarf comprises one of three artworks rendered onto silk: Laura Knight’s painting, The Bathing Pool, 1918; Walter Bayes’s oil painting, Lady with Sunshade; and New Zealand-born Maud Sherwood’s watercolour, Girl in the Boat, 1922. All three artworks feature in Romancing the Collection, an exhibition that offers audiences an opportunity to fall in love all over again with the city’s public art collection.
Karen Walker shares the process of conceptualising and creating the range and the special relationship that she has with Auckland Art Gallery.