When Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham take a stroll, they’re all eyes. Pattern-spotters extraordinaire, a quick scroll through the images on their cult blog, Patternity, reveals the extent of their shared obsession. Its rolling procession of parallel images from nature, science, art, architecture and design makes for compulsive viewing. A model of a carbon atom is grouped with a Tom Dixon light shade, an Ai Weiwei sculpture with basket fungus – all united by their three-dimensional hexagonal forms.
Since Patternity’s inception in 2009, what might at first appear to be a purely aesthetic endeavour has evolved into what the pair earnestly call “a philosophy of seeing”. They study the history of human uses for patterns, how and why they occur in nature and science, and the reasons everyone enjoys looking at and recognising patterns. As well as the website, Patternity has grown into a thriving design studio, online community and now a handsome coffee-table book.
“We’re not looking very Patternity today,” says Murray, when we meet in their studio. Sat at a large monochrome marquetry table, that they designed themselves, Murray is wearing head-to-toe black, Winteringham plain jeans and a T-shirt. “Now and again I’ll wear the tights, but we often say all the patterns are all in there,” Murray says, tapping her temple.
The tights were their first product, with designs far from the neat regular patterns people usually wear on their legs. They took over a Selfridges shop window for the launch, “and from there,” says Murray, “more projects rolled in”. A monochrome cashmere kimono-like cardigan hangs on the wall – a collaboration with eco-knitwear designer Chinti and Parker.
It makes sense that their first Patternity products would be in fashion. Murray previously art-directed shoots for brands such as Louis Vuitton, and much of Winteringham’s work was for the rag trade too. But what’s surprising is that, despite their fascination with organic spirals and fractals, as Winteringham says, “all our designs are very geometric and vector-based”. It’s all stripes and angles.
When they met, says Murray, “we had all this shared research of patterns in literally everything”. “I had loads of cut-outs and magazine tears,” says Winteringham, excitedly. “And then we joined together,” continues Murray, “and it was like a big show-and-tell. We just wanted to share the way we saw the world. There was such abundance of inspiration, we wanted to put it in some kind of order, so a zebra would go next to a barcode. Or a spiralling sea shell would go next to a galaxy.”
They’re obsessed to the point that they’ve consciously applied pattern’s various dictionary definitions to their work. Murray: “When we first started the company, we’d say pattern and people would say, ‘Oh yeah, wallpaper’. And that’s a big part of it – repeated decorative design – but then there’s also the definition of pattern as ‘setting an example to follow’, for instance, which we really like, because our philosophy is about setting a positive pattern that people can do themselves.”
The book can be absorbed on different levels. You can simply feast on the beautiful pictures. Or you can chew on Murray’s essays, which spiral off into the history of thought, science and philosophy. She writes, for example, about the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci’s discovery, in around 1200, of a seemingly divine sequence of numbers – the Fibonacci sequence – which applies to nature’s most beautiful formations. Each number in it is made by adding the previous two together: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 and so on, and the sequence can be seen in the spirals of pine cones, snail shells, hurricanes, spiral galaxies and seed heads; in the arrangement of flower petals, leaves and tree branches. Any pair of numbers in the sequence corresponds with the golden ratio, a mathematical equation that creates the most attractive proportions. The ratio has been used in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci and probably even in the building of the pyramids and the Parthenon. But why are these patterns so appealing? Could it be because of their sheer ubiquity, repeated even in our own DNA?
As science writer and editor at the journal Nature, Philip Ball points out in his foreword: “Our brains are attuned to finding regularities in the world and using them to make predictions and deductions.” Pattern is the basis of science, language, culture and “our place in the cosmos”. Music flows in patterns, we build in patterns, our social structures follow patterns. Which is why, he writes, “our brains aren’t just adept at finding order and pattern, but respond to them aesthetically, rewarding ourselves with the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing universal harmonies”.
For Murray and Winteringham, pattern appreciation has become a way of life, and an exercise in mindfulness. While the pair are fascinated by nature’s grand designs, they hold a special reverence for finding symmetry in the mundane, or as they put it, “the spaces between things, as much as things themselves”. Manhole covers, the dusty cables running along the walls of the London Underground, and undulating stripes cast by stacks of plastic sun loungers are celebrated alongside the iconic Giant’s Causeway and a cross-section of the Large Hadron Collider. “It’s almost meditative,” says Murray. “You’re finding connections, and there’s something very satisfying about that.”
The pair spread their belief in pattern power further with pattern-spotting field trips, even festivals. Their first, in 2013, was called Superstripe. “We had workshops on how and why we think in linear patterns, or why a zebra is stripy,” says Murray. “Then we had this big exhibition: a journey through stripe,” adds Winteringham. Their second, the Festival of Pattern, will run during next month’s London design festival. It includes a day-long retreat called Happy Patterns, which will include a mindfulness workshop exploring the power of curiosity and a sound-bath meditation (“vibrational patterns” as Murray jauntily puts it).
Murray and Winteringham are both designers and design consultants. As consultants, they’re hired to advise brands and organisations on how they can use pattern, “be that through design application or curating events and experiences”, says Murray. Clients have included Apple, the BBC, Google, Levi’s, Nike, and the V&A. They’ve printed geometric shapes onto Clarks Originals desert boots. They’ve devised cushion covers for the Imperial War Museum’s shop, based on the zebra-like “dazzle” camouflage on first world war ships.
“Pattern is something everyone can relate to,” says Winterington. “Among our Instagram followers you see repetitions and symmetry – even if they’re not yet aware of the patterns in their photography.” Many members of this global community have contributed their own snaps to the Patternity archives, and indeed the book. “Pattern is inclusive,” says Murray, “it’s not confined to the walls of an art gallery or a fashion runway.” When they asked the man who drives the Mars Rover how pattern applies to his work, she says, he replied: “It’s everything!”
