World of Interiors March 1996
"They're rainwater pipe and dowel", says Katherine Morris, describing the home-made drying rollers which hover in her hallway. Empty now, they are usually hidden under the rolls of wallpaper she hand-prints in her living room. Exquisitely-cut lino blocks lie on her dining table, pots of paint jostle on the bookshelf. It's all strangely idyllic.
Her love of papers comes from Peggy Angus, the Grand Old Lady of Linocut and a family friend. "I used to help her print up designs at the Camden Studios", says Morris. "...I also looked after her at the end of her life."
Continuing rather than copying Angus's techniques, she now prints her own pleasing and clever two-colour papers with the same meticulous commitment to "integrity" and "joy of production". They are finer than Peggy's but similarly created as backgrounds for paintings: the two shared a horror of bald walls.
Hand-printing gives Morris's designs a soft dignity which most modern papers simply don't have. Unlike other contemporary designers, she looks at the actual plants and animals she is representing as well as at pictures and pattern books. It gives her work a real freshness and bite. There's nothing arbitrary about her cats or birds; her brambles have a genuine prickle.
Friends keep advising her to forget this labour-intensive cottage industry and mass-produce the designs, "They say there isn't much money in it", she tells me, "but that's not the point. I enjoy it." Walls should think themselves lucky.
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