Hormazd Narielwalla Between the Garden Lines Phillips Screenprints

A single thread unspooled from history can yield remarkable colour. Hormazd Narielwalla has pulled a 1904 French dress pattern into the light and transformed its delicate network of sewing instructions, embroidery drafts and constructional lines into three vivid screenprints, each one a meditation on how we perceive pattern, ornament and the spaces between them.

The work, titled Between the Garden Lines, emerges from a collaboration with JI Editions and is now available through Phillips' Dropshop. It stands as a meditation on visual focus and the paradox of attention: the moment we concentrate upon the floral elements, the structural lines dissolve; shift our gaze to the geometry, and the botanical forms retreat. The artist likens this oscillation to viewing a formal garden through a spider's web, where fountains and follies exist in perpetual visual dialogue with the threads that frame them.

Pattern as Palimpsest

What makes Narielwalla's interpretation particularly elegant is his refusal to deny the coexistence of competing visual languages. Rather than subordinate the dress pattern's historical utility to pure aesthetic abstraction, he honours both dimensions simultaneously. The screenprints preserve the precision of the original sewing schematic—the measured lines, the notational marks, the technical vocabulary of tailoring—whilst elevating them into the realm of fine printmaking.

By selecting a French dress pattern from the early twentieth century, Narielwalla engages with a moment when fashion design itself was becoming increasingly systematic and widely disseminated. Dress patterns represented democracy in style: they brought high design into domestic spaces, allowing countless hands to recreate elegance at home. To render them as fine art is to acknowledge that labour, that invisible craft, and to celebrate the beauty inherent in instruction itself.

Collaboration and Technique

The partnership with JI Editions underscores Narielwalla's commitment to the handmade. Screenprinting, with its demands for precision, layering and sequential colour application, mirrors the painstaking work of embroidery and pattern-drafting that inspired the series. Each impression carries the mark of deliberate human intervention; no two prints emerge identically from the process.

The triptych format amplifies this dialogue between perception and representation. Viewed together, the three works create a visual argument about how our eyes move through space, how focus shifts, how the relationship between foreground and background remains eternally unstable. It is the work of an artist attuned to the subtleties of line, colour and the pleasure of looking itself.

Available Now

The prints are available through Phillips' Dropshop, bringing them within reach of a broad audience of contemporary art collectors. This accessibility reflects a broader shift within the auction house toward making significant works available beyond the traditional sale-room model, whilst maintaining the curatorial rigour and production standards for which Phillips is known.

Between the Garden Lines invites the collector into Narielwalla's world of visual paradox and historical reverence. These are works that reward sustained looking, revealing fresh layers of meaning with each encounter. They speak to anyone moved by the interplay of craft, geometry and colour, and to those who understand that true abstraction often emerges from the closest possible attention to the real.

Key Facts

Title: Between the Garden Lines
Artist: Hormazd Narielwalla
Format: Screenprints (trio)
Collaborator: JI Editions
Source: 1904 French dress pattern
Available Via: Phillips Dropshop

The Simply Luxury View

Narielwalla's work exemplifies a contemporary approach to printmaking that marries rigorous historical research with formal experimentation. By mining the archive of dress-making—a domain historically undervalued in fine art discourse—he elevates the aesthetic and intellectual significance of domestic craft. The decision to present this series through both Phillips' traditional channels and its Dropshop platform reflects an intelligent acknowledgment that significant contemporary art need not be confined to the auction block alone.

For collectors interested in works that operate simultaneously as historical inquiry and formal investigation, Between the Garden Lines offers intellectual substance and visual elegance. The triptych format and the screenprinting technique root these works in a lineage of twentieth-century print innovation, whilst the conceptual rigour ensures they remain urgently contemporary. This is art that enriches a collection and invites continued contemplation.

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