Zakee Shariff (born 1970, UK)
'Karokia'  (sic)
2004
Design for a textile for the West Coast Highway fashion collection Spring Summer 2005
Printed by London Printworks Trust
Seen here as a screenprint on handmade paper
Width 205 cm x height 60 cm
Given by the Artist
Museum no. E.2-2006

Zakee Shariff has been designing print-based women's wear since 1996 and for the last six years has run her own business. Her designs have been sought by Liberty, Selfridges and various independents both in Britain and across the world. Recent collaborations include Top Shop, Freemans Mail Order and Boxfresh. She has also attracted such companies as Coca Cola, Nike and Nokia . Selected for her imaginative style, combining fun with 'street-cred', Shariff suggests how product leaders like to use design to define their brand, while at the same time she is an interesting example of how designers are marketing themselves in a variety of outlets.

In 2004 on holiday in California, she stopped at the famous Korakia Pension near Palm Springs, a hotel traditionally beloved by luminaries of the literary and fashion worlds. The sketches and drawings she made on the trip were later absorbed into her designs for the West Coast Highway Spring Summer collection 2005, but she also showed many of them as wall-based screenprints on paper and aluminium in a show at London Printworks in Autumn 2004. 'Karokia' [sic], named for the pension, works equally well as a fine-art image and as a textile design, and evokes both exuberant holiday spirit and the extraordinary topography of the Californian coast line, through the playful appropriation of contour lines on printed maps.