Margo Selby is a woven textile designer with a bold approach to creating luxurious fabrics.  Her instinctive and spontaneous colour palettes are fresh and striking, yet the combinations have a complex richness which allow the products to work harmoniously within a variety of both traditional and modern interiors.  All the fabrics are designed on handlooms by Margo and then developed so they can be produced by specialist mills.

She trained at Chelsea College of Art and Design and then followed this with a postgraduate degree at The Royal College of Art (RCA), graduating in 2001.  Responding to the overwhelming demand for her fabrics following the RCA degree show, Margo began to develop relationships with mills to explore the possibilities of production. The next 18 months were spent at The Ann Sutton Foundation, a pioneering research centre for woven textiles where Margo was one of the founding fellows working on projects for industry alongside developing her own work.  It was during this time that Margo united her innovative hand-woven structures with industrial machinery to create the unique 3-dimensional fabrics that were to become the trademark of the Margo Selby Brand.

The first collection was launched in 2003 with the help of a development award from The Crafts Council. Margo works from her design studio in the creative seaside town of Whitstable where her collection has grown to include an interior range of cushions, throws, upholstery fabrics, wallpapers and bespoke rugs.  The fashion and lifestyle range also includes scarves, purses and jackets. The trademark patterned and textured products are fast becoming coveted contemporary classics and Margo is now established as a pioneer within contemporary textiles.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

It was after their first textile exhibitions in the UK and Scandinavia that they realised the lack of space for contemporary textiles within the art community and the general lack of understanding of what textiles can be. It was from this realisation that their goal became to provide opportunities for contemporary textiles to be seen and understood.

Kalopsia now brings attention to this upcoming field and sees textiles as a distinct artistic practice which opens up the debate on “What is Textiles”. This is the title of Kalopsia’s current exhibition on at Whitespace, Edinburgh until 2 May.

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