As a print designer, I create repeat pattern designs by hand with paint, lino blocks, markers, pastels, you name it, before I digitize them for printing onto fabric with screens or digital printing. Designs are always “in repeat,” meaning they seamlessly repeat themselves throughout the fabric so that garments may be cut and sewn from any point. Before beginning my studies in fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I rarely considered the role of the designer behind the fabrics I saw in shops.

When I started noticing the marvelous designs in animals and plants through nature documentaries and trips to the zoo and aquarium with my sons, I realized something huge: the Lord himself is a surface designer. From the polyps in the coral reefs to the biofluorescent plumes of the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise, all the way down to plankton and mitochondria, the evidence of repeat patterns is interwoven throughout the world.

Repeating patterns in nature, and in textiles, can reveal the divine.