Spatial designer Anna Burns and acclaimed artist Hayden Kays are collaborating on a provocative new collection – “Nude Religion” – celebrating love, sex, worship and the female form for this year’s London Design Festival.
Inspired by this natural alliance, “Nude Religion” showcases a selection of fabrics featuring original ABO designs intertwined with Hayden’s hand-drawn depictions. These are informed by Anna’s merging of the everyday alongside the provocative and surreal.
Anna’s print STRIP draws on a photocopy aesthetic that puts a twist on the usually banal striped patterns. While “Heavenly Bodies” takes the breast out of context and places it into a digital Magritte-style textile of fluffy clouds that provide the perfect cushion for nestling breasts.
Hayden has married these designs with illustrations in the form of life and death, love and sex, skulls and flowers – a combination of brash and abrupt images, spliced with delicate illustrations.
They are embroidered onto British-made soft cotton velvet and linen fabrics adding a cynically sentimental feel to the designs that play with the awkward to make it beautiful.
Both will also unveil individual works – Hayden will be exhibiting a bespoke 1970s Danish designed chair, upholstered in a velvet monochrome pattern of his signature skulls called “Bittersweet Symmetry”.
Anna said “Hayden’s melancholic take on romance have always struck a chord with me, so when the opportunity came to collaborate I felt we could create a dialogue between my visceral prints and objects and his compellingly guttural feelings”.
Anna has been creating sets and environments for photography, runway, events and shows and window displays as well as art installations over her 15-year career in fashion. Her work has graced the pages of fashion magazines worldwide and her acclaimed displays for Hermes, Burberry and Louboutin continue to inspire awe and wonder from passers-by. Her ground-breaking photo shoots for “Casa Vogue” were the incentive to explore everyday home products that launched Anna Burns Object.
