Events & Exhibitions

Having had her work scouted at her degree show, Tori was invited by Anne Hitchcock to showcase her textiles and wallpaper at Walford Mill for the Wood & Fibre exhibition, along with furniture makers Matthew Burt & Karen Hansen and textile artists Jenni Burrows, Valerie Tulloch, Carita Rose, Annie Sharp, Angie Parker & Imogen Luddy.

This exhibition looks at aspects of the current relationship between textiles for the home and the furniture which accompanies them.  It offers a fusion of beautiful handmade wooden furniture together with delicate hand woven, stitched and sewn textiles. Curated by Anne Hitchcock of the Slade Centre in Gillingham.  

Tori’s designs focus on stylised illustrations and fine-art printing techniques to create beautifully distinctive and innovative hand-printed pieces for the home.  She takes her inspiration from museum archives, natural forms and the weird and wonderful in the world around her. Using her loose-line drawing style, she often combines her drawings with other fine-art printing techniques, such as wood and linocuts.  Her motifs are carefully crafted into repeat and made into screen prints which Tori loving prints by hand in her home studio using hand coloured dyes and pigments. Tori’s passion for pattern and lively colour are always at the heart of her design process, as she believes these lift the spirit and bring beauty and joy into the home.

The toy characters, animals and apparatus of A. Schoenhut’s Humpty Dumpty Circus, held in the archives of the V&A’s Museum of Childhood, captured her heart and inspired this interior collection.

Launched in 1903, these engaging hand-painted toys have a folk-art quality with their hand-carved imperfections and unselfconscious liveliness. Ingeniously designed as a cross between building blocks and a balancing toy, their patented ball-jointed arms, legs and heads, combined with their slotted feet and hands, allow the characters and animals to be posed, balanced and reconfigured in "10,001 astonishing combinations" to perform intriguing feats.  Tori's ‘Circus Collection’ aims to capture some of their quirkiness and liveliness in a contemporary way by taking a 20th century popular American toy and giving it a 21st British twist.