Curl

Curl owes something to the great cinemas of the 1930s, when even a night at the pictures came with a little glamour. Their interiors embraced geometry, repetition and sweeping decorative forms, translating Art Deco into something theatrical and distinctly modern.

The scallop was particularly at home in this world. Its curved geometry appeared across fabrics, plasterwork, metalwork and decorative glass. There was precision behind it, but also exuberance. Deco understood that repetition did not have to mean restraint.

Curl revisits that language through a nested scallop. Each form sits within the next, allowing a relatively simple curve to develop a stronger graphic presence through repetition. The effect recalls the overlapping shells, fans and radiating motifs associated with the period, without attempting to reproduce them.

There is a hint of the Odeon cinema in its character. Those buildings made modernism approachable, wrapping streamlined architecture in colour, pattern and decorative flourish. Curl shares some of that optimism. It takes an ordered geometry and allows it to have personality.

Curl is not intended as a period piece. Its 1930s influence provides a starting point rather than a destination. What survives is the pleasure of the scallop itself: generous, decorative and just theatrical enough.

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