Dawn Walker — There’s a Pattern Here

Dawn Walker — There’s a Pattern Here - theHumm April 2022

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

The ability to identify patterns is an essential ingredient of human intelligence and development. It is a foundational component of mathematics, and more recently an essential underpinning of artificial intelligence. For we humans, it can also be fun and entertaining. For Almonte artist Dawn Walker, her talent for creating visual patterns on surfaces has become her passion.

Anyone who has wandered around a fabric store is intimately familiar with the importance of surface pattern design (SPD). Patterns bring life and appeal to the surfaces with which we clothe ourselves and our furniture and our tables and our notebooks and our Kleenex boxes. Kids’ pajamas are a happy example of the emotional impact patterns deliver. Walker’s patterns deliver a wide range of emotional reactions. Even when spring is finally springing, her happy, vividly hued tea towels burst upon your Canadian-winter-colour-deprived senses like a bouquet of fresh flowers. Throw pillows brighten up your spirits as well as your living room. She also creates decorated paper products such as calendars and note cards.

A major influence in her work is her association with fabulous clothing designer Paddye Mann, whom she describes as a mentor. In a casual encounter seven years ago, Walker mentioned that she was interested in focusing on textile design, and Mann said: “Okay — let’s do it.” The collaboration has been enormously productive, as Walker’s patterns now are available on towels, aprons, pillow covers and other items as custom limited editions through Paddye Mann’s wonderful clothing store in Pakenham. She also credits Mann with making invaluable contributions to her confidence and her motivation. As a busy mother of two young children, and especially during the past two difficult Covid years, the support and encouragement she receives from fellow artists remains invaluable.

Some of us always know what we want to “be”, but for others, it takes some living to find our calling. Many visual artists describe the moment they identified their medium as the moment that changed their life. And it is always a change for the better. Dawn Walker grew up near Westport along a meandering stream that joined the Tay River. She remembers spending most of her youth in her room drawing or outdoors exploring the rivers, lakes and forests around her. She was shy and spent her time writing and illustrating stories. She wanted to learn French, so she spent a year at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, QC, in the Fine Arts program. After moving back to Ottawa she started taking classes at the Ottawa School of Art. When she worked at Wallack’s she spent most of her paycheck on art supplies. Eventually she put together a portfolio and enrolled at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto to study photography, film and video, where she got her B.A. and her first taste of digital work.

She followed her best friend to Tofino on Vancouver Island, where she worked in a variety of service jobs, managing B&Bs, and working for an eco-friendly bio-diesel bus transportation system. When her partner Ed Jenkins followed her out there, they decided to move to Sooke (near Victoria) where she started doing bookkeeping and migrated to using 3D software to do residential design. Ed, meanwhile, was pursuing his landscaping interests, and in 2007 they decided to return to his hometown of Almonte, buy a house, and raise a family.

An important milestone on the road to discovering her passion was reading The Artist’s Way. Dawn had always kept a sketchbook, but following Julia Cameron’s “techniques to open up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery” set her on the path to becoming a surface pattern designer. She had been working at the Almonte Print Shop doing graphic design and had done a brochure for the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum where she incorporated pattern into the design. It was through this project that she came to realize that creating patterns was her happy place. The Internet proved to be a wonderful source of both instruction and inspiration. Besides online classes, she began following other surface designers like Toronto-based Elizabeth Olwen, and dove right into the world of SPD. By 2010 she was entering competitions and selling at farmers’ markets and craft shows. She bought a letterpress and started creating stationery and note cards and other paper products.

Starting her family in 2013 both hindered and accelerated her career as an artist. While her daughter and son were pre-school age, and again during the past two years, childcare responsibilities were enormous. On the other hand, it precipitated her collaboration with fellow Almonte artists in the establishment of Carriageway Studio, which was a constant source of motivation and encouragement. Finally, in her own words, “Having kids got me laser focused; I don’t have any time to waste.” She now shares a beautiful studio with Sarah Jaynes at 46 Mill Street in Almonte.

Last year Dawn entered nine designs in a competition to appear in the 4th edition (Spring 2021) of the UPPERCASE #49 Surface Pattern Design Guide published by the popular design publication UPPERCASE based in Calgary. She was thrilled to have three of her designs published among only one hundred selected from submissions by 850 designers, each of whom submitted between six and nine patterns, for a minimum of well over 5,000 designs. The curator of the competition then chose Dawn’s design as her example of how: “…successful submissions usually had a confident use of colour… the artist had a sophisticated interpretation of colour… some sort of personality presented in that colour.” This artist certainly does.

The Curator also wrote: “Pattern designers engage in an art fundamentally rooted in optimism: that there will always be more — more things of beauty, more objects of utility, more time and, always, more beauty.” Please see the back of Dawn Walker’s Artist Trading Card for coordinates to view her vivacious, beautiful and intriguing patterns, and to purchase handmade stationery and other offerings. And check out uppercasemagazine.com/products/uppercase-49-single-copy ; particularly minute 4 of the video at the bottom of the page.

Gratuitous footnote: The generous gentleman who regularly critiques my draft articles and is an inveterate punster is perplexed as to why Surface Pattern Design does not rebrand itself as Flattery since it is two-dimensional by definition. Also, flattery is the sincerest form of imitation…