The Battenberg cake has a visual logic that any screen printer should find satisfying: the repeating squares of pink and yellow, the surrounding marzipan, the whole thing a grid made from entirely natural materials. Jonathan Lawes takes that starting point — the title’s gentle humour and the geometric suggestion — and processes it through seven layers of abstract colour to arrive somewhere the original subject wouldn’t predict.
Lawes graduated in Printed Textiles & Surface Pattern Design from Leeds Arts University in 2009, spent nearly a decade in Berlin and has been based in south-east London since 2018. His practice is built on the silkscreen process used as drawing: cutting loose stencils, building layers of translucent pigment, hand-pulling each sheet. Seven colours, 310gsm Southbank Smooth paper. Signed. £60.
