Sir Plus x Rose Electra Harris: Meet the artist
As the second instalment of our collaboration with Rose Electra Harris lands, we revisit our conversation with the artist in her south London studio.
There’s no mistaking a Rose Electra Harris. The London-based artist is fast carving a name for herself through her bright, colourful dreamscapes. Each of her prints are filled with everyday objects, exploring household interiors with texture and colour. For our first collection with Rose, she designed a capsule collection of silk ties and pocket squares featuring a one-off palm tree print.
“The palm tree is something that comes up a lot in my work,” Rose told us when we visited her south London studio. “I take a lot of inspiration from travelling to places like India and Morocco, and there’s this tropical feel which I love.”
Rose created the print from an original painting, which was digitally scanned and layered with freehand drawing. The two colours on offer – canary yellow and baby pink – recall Rose’s signature etchings and prints.
“I wanted there to be a consistency with my other works,” she said. “To be able to create new drawings while referencing existing designs and mixing them up was really fun.”
Over the past few years Rose has doubled down on her aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by her childhood growing up with an antiques dealer father and interior designer mother.
“When I first started studying at university, nothing really stuck with me in terms of style or what I was interested in until I started drawing interiors and something just clicked,” she said. “A lot of my interiors are completely made up. Some will have things that remind me of my childhood – something like a lemon squeezer or a chair or chandelier. I love the idea of the interior, what fills the space and what makes home home. It can be quite personal, there’s always a story there.”
Rose studied printmaking at Brighton University, where she specialised in etching. “I like how technical it is,” she said. “There are so many individual processes that you have to get right, but there is also only a certain amount of control that you can have. I often find marks that I haven’t drawn, luckily I’m not too much of a perfectionist! Lately I’ve started to use a process called Chine-collé using Japanese papers that have these beautiful decorative patterns. You cut them out and collage them, then it goes through the press once it’s inked up and sorts of etches onto the plate. It’s a fiddly process so often things can move and go wrong, so they often end up as one-offs.”
As well as working with Sir Plus, Rose has begun selling prints at the prestigious department store Liberty London. Recently she also held her first solo exhibition, The Difference Between Things, at Blue Shop Cottage.
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