Unseen Future
Wallpaper
Unseen Future
The palm leaf has enjoyed a remarkably long relationship with modernity. It appeared beside glass architecture, tubular furniture and sunken living rooms, bringing something loose and exotic to interiors otherwise preoccupied with clean lines. Somehow, a large houseplant came to represent an optimistic idea of how modern life might look. Unseen Future picks up that optimism and sends it somewhere stranger.
Loose palm fronds drift across the collection alongside hard, angular graphics that belong to a very different vision of the future. By the 1980s, modernity had acquired pixels, electronic colour, virtual spaces and the occasional glitch. The future was no longer simply architectural. It had become digital.
Putting the two together creates exactly the sort of clash I enjoy. The leaves are relaxed and almost languid, while the graphics are abrupt and mechanical. Neither particularly belongs with the other, yet somehow the combination makes both more interesting.
There is a wonderful artificiality to it all. These aren’t botanical studies and the geometry isn’t pretending to be architecture. They belong to the world of images: television graphics, record sleeves, advertising, interiors and all those slightly improbable visions of tomorrow that now look unmistakably like yesterday.
That hindsight is part of the collection’s character. Every generation seems to invent a future in its own image, and those imagined futures eventually become visual artefacts themselves. What once looked startlingly new acquires nostalgia, while ideas dismissed as dated begin to look curious and exciting again.
Unseen Future lives somewhere in that cycle. Palm leaves collide with digital geometry, optimism meets artificiality and two rather different ideas of modern life find themselves sharing the same wall. The future, as it turns out, has a very interesting past.
The Patterns
Palm
Block
Fault
Palm Fault