RED POPPY designer Justyna Medoń graduated in Surface Design from the prestigious College of Communication in London. She honed her skills at London’s Mirjam Roudén Textile Design Studio, a renowned printed textiles workshop which creates and sells its designs for numerous brands and fashion houses around the world. In her second year of studies, Medoń and a friend took part in a competition run by Liberty (a well-known English department store). The pair’s designs for furniture upholstery, inspired by works from the Arts & Craft Movement, won first place and were purchased by Liberty.
London proved to be a turning point in Justyna Medoń’s career. It was there she began her love affair with the screen printing technique, her work on textile designs; and it was there she achieved her first successes. In London she also designed fabric featuring her favourite flowers — poppies. After returning to Poland, Medoń adopted the name for her family business.
RED POPPY was established in 2011 and became the first Polish company to utilise the exceedingly laborious screen printing technique (first used in ancient China and Japan) to produce its wallpaper patterns. The technique demands great skill in transferring designs onto mesh which, in turn, is transferred onto a chosen fabric. The fabrics and wallpapers, which are carefully and specially selected for their high quality and ecological values, are imported from London.
At the company’s workshop in Warsaw, the wallpapers and fabrics are spread out on vast tables — the wallpaper table measures two by two metres, the fabric table six by ten. A screen — a silk mesh stretched over an aluminium frame — is then used to manually transfer each original RED POPPY design. Photo-emulsion is distributed over the screen; when dry, the hand-drawn design is applied and left to expose in a darkroom. Then printing can begin. Each colour is applied individually through the mesh onto the fabric below. The entire process — in accordance with tradition — bears the hallmark of a human hand, from the creation of the design to its production.
The choice of RED POPPY designs is incredibly varied. Original drawings include fauna (e.g. Swallows in the Sky, Parrots, Zebras), flora (Maple Leaves, Secret Garden), figural motifs (Dancers), abstract compositions (Abstract Fushion, Blur), inspirations from the culture of the East (Japanese Samurai), evocations of the classics (Pearl Palace), and designs from the 1960s (Sixties).
In 2012, RED POPPY’s products were awarded special distinction at the Must Have competition run by the Łódź Design Festival, and were displayed at the largest design festival in Poland. In 2013, the studio’s work featured at the Must Have from Poland exhibition at Ventura Lambratte, as part of the iSaloni Fair in Milan.
RED POPPY creates a range of home furnishing products. Their designs may be transferred onto wallpaper, fabrics, furniture upholstery, curtains, cushions, lampshades, and even ceramics. They may be used to form a set, but they do not have to be: after all, each of the designs can be printed in the colour combination of your choice. The same design can be used for interiors in the form of different objects, in a variety of colour schemes. This offers unlimited possibilities for personalising products and increases the uniqueness of the designs which — although reproducible — are born by the touch of a human hand. The RED POPPY brand’s underlying strengths are its individual approach to object design and the unity of its numerous creations.
Read more at: http://www.redpoppy.pl (in Polish and English)
Author: Krystyna Łuczak-Surówka, October 2013
English translation: Garry Malloy