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Olive Ashworth / Australia 1915–2000 / Design: Coral garden c.1956 / Gouache and pencil on card / 22.5 x 19.7cm / Purchased 1996. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist
Olive AshworthDesign: Coral garden c.1956
Not Currently on Display
Olive Ashworth created vivid textile designs based on her underwater observations of the Great Barrier Reef. Her designs often retailed successfully in Europe, but her own interest in using Queensland-inspired motifs developed with the growing interest in local tourism in the region.
Ashworth’s designs were initially sketched in pencil and then filled in with gouache. Her original working sketches remain relatively uncommon, however, as they were usually sent overseas to serve as a guide in the production of her printed textiles and rarely returned. This sketch is one of many pencil and watercolour studies of coral, shells and fish that Ashworth created to refine her ideas. It is the original design for the printed textile Coral garden, but it was not put into production until some 15 years later.
Born in Brisbane in 1915, Olive Ashworth was educated at the private girls’ school Somerville House, where she was taught art by Enid Dickson. After the death of her father, the family moved to Melbourne, where she studied commercial art at the Art Training Institute, completing the course by correspondence on her return to Brisbane. She ran Burns Philp’s art department before starting her own business in 1945, and Olive Ashworth Publicity Services lasted for over 20 years.1
Ashworth became involved in the promotion of Queensland’s burgeoning tourist industry, designing brochures for Surfers Paradise and the Reef Islands, and later for Townsville, Innisfail and Mackay. Inspired by the tropical north, and especially by the marine life of the Great Barrier Reef, she started to design her own textiles. In 1958-60, she was commissioned by a Swedish firm to produce a design based on the Great Barrier Reef, which retailed successfully in Europe. In 1971, she established her own design firm, which produced many furnishing and fashion fabrics.
Olive Ashworth is one of the few Australians, and the only Queensland-based artist, to contribute significantly to textile design in the 1950s.
Endnotes:
1 Joan Kerr, ‘Olive Ashworth: Biography’, Design and Art Australia Online, www.daao.org.au/bio/olive-ashworth/biography/, 1995 (updated 2011), accessed 26 September 2017. Also, see Bronwyn Larner and Fran Considine, ‘A complementary caste: A homage to women artists’ in Queensland, Past and Present [exhibition catalogue], Centre Gallery, Surfers Paradise, Qld., 1988, p.71.