Timorous Beasties

Timorous Beasties was established in Glasgow in 1990 by Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons, who met studying Textile Design at Glasgow School of Art. Timorous Beasties work embodies a unique diversity of pattern, ranging from design that echoes a golden age of copperplate engraving (a time-honoured classic is the Thistle range; or Merian Palm superwide wallpaper) to example of a distinctly edgy nature, an elegant transgression, a display of chic irreverence. Yet, the studio fully engages a design discourse with textiles history by lending an aesthetic evolution to time-honoured motifs. In 2004 Timorous Beasties unveiled their critically acclaimed Glasgow Toile: by reversing the pastoral context of toiles de Jouy, they transformed the traditional toile device to create an exclusively modern urban genre. The Hotch Blotch fabric series challenges a 1000-year old aesthetic mode by placing disorder within the structure of damask pattern to reveal the inherent beauty of splatters, drips ...