Grand Hall Shades

The Alpha Workshops collaborated with the PHA Digital Print Lab to produce blackout shades for the Grand Hall, installed in advance of the Powerhouse: International festival. Using the UV SwissQ printer, the Digital Print Lab produced a design by Emma Hollister-Colby of The Alpha Workshops, based on the pre-existing Gilda pattern created by Alpha team member Erik Savage.

Originally conceived as hand-painted, the shades’ design had to be adapted when it became clear that painted surfaces were incompatible with the automated roller technology of the UV printer. Building on Gilda, Hollister-Colby extracted and refined a series of underlying shapes to form an idiosyncratic base pattern for each shade. She drew inspiration from the colors in the Grand Hall’s graffiti, incorporating complementary hues in expressive, carefully considered moments of color. Each shade layout responds to the artworks beside it as well as to the other shades in the series.

As Hollister-Colby notes, “We knew the taupe tone of the shade fabric would mute the overall printed palette, but that subtlety helped preserve the importance of the graffiti. The end result is, hopefully, a symphonic interplay between design and art: the soft ‘piano’ of the supporting shades and the bravura ‘fortissimo’ of the original graffiti.”