Marina Willer’s acclaimed series Overlooked returned as part of 2024's London Design Festival with a striking new series of prints featuring new patterns, and fluorescent colours printed on a range of coloured paper by Fedrigoni.
Overlooked is a celebration of London’s street covers and their often intricate designs. Found across the city from Brixton to Kensington, these humble objects are the gatekeepers to a mysterious underground world. Many of the covers were installed by 19th and early 20th-century utility companies who provided London residents with new services such as water and sewage, gas and electricity, telegraph and telephones through a network of subterranean tunnels.
The new prints follow Marina’s original Overlooked series, using the 19th-century practice of taking rubbings of religious icons as its starting point. This technique gives a detailed negative image of the original object, which is then screenprinted in layers using fluorescent inks.
The neon-coloured rubbings depict these metal lids as impeccable pieces of industrial design, threaded throughout the functional fabric of a city. By applying such vibrant combination of colours the series celebrates the decorative nature of these objects and patterns which contrast beautifully with their functional nature and industrial aesthetic.
Marina and her team scoured the city streets to find the best examples of these fascinating objects, and most of the iron street covers display the name of the foundry where they were originally cast.
The new series is even more vibrant and diverse than the original, covering many areas across London. They serve as a reminder that a city’s beauty isn’t limited to art galleries or grand architecture, and that intriguing design is everywhere if we just look for it.
The LDF exhibition brought together this celebration of colour and joy in an industrial space under the railway at Bankside District’s Borough Yards—a new development based in and around a series of atmospheric restored railway arches next to Southwark‘s famous Borough Market—it attracted several hundred visitors from around the world over the nine days of the festival.
Longstanding Pentagram collaborator Dan Mather hand screenprinted all of the B1 editions from his studio in Yorkshire. For over a decade Dan has crafted his artistic practice, specialising in collaborating to produce limited-edition, fine art, original silkscreen prints, traditionally by hand for designers, brands and artists internationally, including Harry Pearce, Matt Willey, Louisa Parris, Fedrigoni, The National Gallery and British Museum.
During the exhibition, Dan and Marina held screenprinting workshops people could create their own designs as a response to the Overlooked prints.
Overlooked made its debut at an exhibition in 2016, and the project was published as the 45th edition of the Pentagram Papers. A set of eight posters are now housed in the V&A’s permanent collection.
The limited edition posters, T-shirts and totes are now available to purchase at overlookedprints.com
