Although visionaries and key protagonists of the visual aesthetic of punk, Dove and White began designing iconic T-shirts and textiles in the late 1960's which were snapped up by iconic rockers like Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop, the latter by wearing their now legendary 'Wild Thing' leather jacket on the back of his 'Raw Power' album sleeve.
This exhibition will act as a survey of their prodigious output including drawings, prints, textiles, multiples and a giant 3m T shirt. It will include artworks spanning their 40-year career, book-ended by White's early textile designs and Dove's coloured pencil 'cinema drawings' from the 60's to 2025 and their beach-collected assemblages.
John Dove, an artist and illustrator who taught drawing at Sutton School of Art in 1965, and Molly White, a textile designer who was also teaching Printed Textiles at Berkshire College of Art, made a career in fashion based on the convergence of music, fashion, art and graphics. They were inventing print technology not to make small editions to be framed, but to make editions in the thousands for a global audience.
Dove had already understood and investigated the concept of the unlimited multiple, having fabricated his ‘Liberty Souvenir’ edition for Tommy Roberts’ shop Mr Freedom, and his unlimited ‘Flying Ducks’ multiple, 1970, which was included in the exhibition of Multiple Art called ‘3 To Infinity’ at The Whitechapel Gallery, London. Dove and White had already conceived their Cut ‘n’ Sew ‘Strawberry kit’ multiple in 1968, later made famous when Paul McCartney wore it on the Wings Tour, 1973, and carried by Fiorucci and Camomilla, Rome.
'If chaos is the condition for a creative surge then now is our time to be brave and step out of the mould. Molly and I are always aware that mere digital printing or auto screen-printing is no different from ripping a repro out of a book and chucking it into a frame. You gotta have soul!'
'Molly drives herself with the reminder that she has to start the day with a pencil in her hand to stay on a journey that’s forever changing. She says, “Sometimes you know exactly what you are searching for and sometimes everything happens on it’s own like there’s a ghost in your head. That’s what you’re living for – it’ s the only way to go forward in life and work. When you look back, that’s when you realise with surprise that the images you’ve made correspond so closely to the direction your life had taken at that time. It’s an organic development that doesn’t start or stop with a switch ….. But It would be great if you could have an ‘art switch’ that you could turn on and off – CLICK!”.' John Dove & Molly White
This exhibition will act as a survey of their prodigious output including drawings, prints, textiles, multiples and a giant 3m T shirt. It will include artworks spanning their 40-year career, book-ended by White's early textile designs and Dove's coloured pencil 'cinema drawings' from the 60's to 2025 and their beach-collected assemblages.
John Dove, an artist and illustrator who taught drawing at Sutton School of Art in 1965, and Molly White, a textile designer who was also teaching Printed Textiles at Berkshire College of Art, made a career in fashion based on the convergence of music, fashion, art and graphics. They were inventing print technology not to make small editions to be framed, but to make editions in the thousands for a global audience.
Dove had already understood and investigated the concept of the unlimited multiple, having fabricated his ‘Liberty Souvenir’ edition for Tommy Roberts’ shop Mr Freedom, and his unlimited ‘Flying Ducks’ multiple, 1970, which was included in the exhibition of Multiple Art called ‘3 To Infinity’ at The Whitechapel Gallery, London. Dove and White had already conceived their Cut ‘n’ Sew ‘Strawberry kit’ multiple in 1968, later made famous when Paul McCartney wore it on the Wings Tour, 1973, and carried by Fiorucci and Camomilla, Rome.
'If chaos is the condition for a creative surge then now is our time to be brave and step out of the mould. Molly and I are always aware that mere digital printing or auto screen-printing is no different from ripping a repro out of a book and chucking it into a frame. You gotta have soul!'
'Molly drives herself with the reminder that she has to start the day with a pencil in her hand to stay on a journey that’s forever changing. She says, “Sometimes you know exactly what you are searching for and sometimes everything happens on it’s own like there’s a ghost in your head. That’s what you’re living for – it’ s the only way to go forward in life and work. When you look back, that’s when you realise with surprise that the images you’ve made correspond so closely to the direction your life had taken at that time. It’s an organic development that doesn’t start or stop with a switch ….. But It would be great if you could have an ‘art switch’ that you could turn on and off – CLICK!”.' John Dove & Molly White
