Liberty Beauty Hall

Wow, what an amazing, dreamy and fulfilling week! I am now the proud owner of three incredibly sore blisters on my hands after spending the last 10 days at Liberty of London creating a hand drawn and painted mural directly onto the wall of their new beauty hall on the ground floor.

It was a lovely open brief, I was invited to create a botanical mural including a peacock. My initial proposal included three design options; a climbing rose, wisteria or magnolia and Liberty selected my favourite of the three - the magnolia tree. Initially the mural was a much smaller intervention, but they really liked the peacock and wanted to feature it across the door of the Queen Mary treatment room - (this is the room where Queen Mary would view her jewellery in private away from public view.)

The photos above were taken during the process of creating the piece, and since then the shop fitters have been in overnight installing the shelves and till point (as indicated in the sketch below - which also gives a better idea of the full design rather than just the detailed shots above.)

The space has been opened to the public today, and I am going back in later to take some more photos of the full mural. They'll also be a short film to share soon, as 20/20 (the design consultancy commissioned by Liberty to create the new Beauty Hall) invited artist Zbigniew Kotkiewicz to document the process of the mural. He was such a lovely person to spend time with and I can't wait to see the film (obviously the poor bloke now has acres of footage of me scrunching up my face in deeply unattractive shapes, squinting my eyes and sticking my tongue out to wade through first!) I pull the most ridiculous faces when drawing and after a while I completely forgot I was being filmed.

Today I'm feeling tired, sore and chuffed to bits, I'm really looking forward to going to Devon tomorrow to spend time with family, have a nice rest and my mum's cooking. I was VERY anxious about this commission, the idea of creating a permanent feature in my favourite store was beyond terrifying, but I'm really, really proud of the finished piece, and so very pleased to have it living in Liberty x