Tropical fish

This is a wallpaper designed by Alan Shillingford for Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd in 1958. The sample, which is a 'sanitary' paper intended for a bathroom, was used in Allan Cockshut's machine-printed 'Star' pattern book which catered for the cheaper end of the market. It features brightly coloured troipical fish swimming amongst underwater plants, in red, green, blue yellow, and white, on a pale blue ground. Listen to the audio created for the Sonic Wallpaper Project commissioned by MoDA and realised by Dr Felicity Ford: https://soundcloud.com/modamuseum/16-badda-4772 To create this piece, willing interviewees were asked to respond to wallpaper in the MoDA collection and asked to share their responses. Felicity then went on to create field-recordings based on what people said about the wallpaper design. She then layered these recordings with the interview material relating to this design, expanding the fantasies of home decorating using the descriptive powers of sound! People responded to this wallpaper (accession no. BADDA 4772) with ideas about bathrooms, and the personalities of the fish featured in the design. The Sonic Wallpaper piece derived from these comments would not have been possible without assistance and expertise from the staff at the Horniman Museum Aquarium and The Aquatic Design Centre.