A-basking in Colour and Form
The online luxury retailer Abask UK has launched a début collection of Pemberton quilts.
Abask is the second retail enterprise from investor Tom Chapman, who, with his wife Ruth, started Matches Fashion in 1987, valued 30 years later at $1 billion and acquired by Apex Partners. In 2022 Chapman, and MatchesFashion e-commerce director Nicholas Pickaerts, founded Abask, with the ambition to offer a curated range of vintage and contemporary objects for the home that had origin, meaning and “soul”. Along with a stable of antiques experts, Abask recruited Bryony Sheridan, former head buyer at Liberty, to identify and work with a careful selection of international makers and keep an unwavering eye on design and craftsmanship.
Sheridan and her colleague Connah Lamb invited Pemberton to propose designs in the ‘Modernist’ and ‘Bohemian’ zones, two of their four style categories (along with ‘Minimal’ and ‘Classical”). We settled on six designs, including a brand new design, Tefnut, inspired by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for water and named for its goddess; and Quad, released for the first time as a machine quilt. Abask is offering these designs in three exclusive colourways. Kuba recalls the colours of traditional Congolese raffia appliqué known as “Kuba cloth”, with a mid-century-modern feel and a red that pops. Alhambra is the three colours of the wall tiles all over the Moorish palace in Granada, grounded with black and white. Carnival is bright, joyful blend of fairground carousel, gypsy caravan and Pakistani painted truck art.
Modernist, for sure, in inspiration; Bohemian, definitely, by virtue of the essentially heterogenous character of patchwork. I’ll take those epithets.
Curllusion, an arrangement of intersecting ovoid shapes and perpendicular lines inspired by a ceramic milk pitcher
Tefnut is named after the ancient Egyptian goddess of water; this flat zig-zag was inspired by the hieroglyph for water.
Fragments, fifteen shards of colour each in its own variegated neutral field
The Shoeman's Puzzle is a traditional patchwork pattern constructed from 4 triangles that multiply and combine with an Op-Art dynamism. Consistent seam allowances are the way to get sharply intersecting points.
Quad, a composition of rectangles inspired by 1960s relief artworks, that uses occlusion and colour variegation to muddle fugure and ground.
Meander, a continuous line in a neutral field, inspired by a drawing by Anni Albers, herself inspired by 13 trips to Mexico; and following the rules of her pattern which correspond with the labyrinth designs traditional to Mayan art.
All six designs are exclusively available to purchase from Abask.com.