designer and printer, was born in Bowral, NSW, officially on 11 February 1912 (although her birthday has always been celebrated on the 12th), youngest of the five children of Alistair Ronald Mackenzie of Ross, Scotland, a British army communications engineer who worked as a telegraph constructor in Melbourne and Western Australia, and Rosalind Isabel Agnes, née Walker, of Victoria. Her father was sixty-five and her mother forty-four when she was born; her two surviving sisters were more than twenty years her senior (the elder was Isabel Mackenzie ). She grew up at Bowral, Armidale, Glebe and Clovelly, visiting painting exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, ballet, concerts, and plays at Her Majesty’s Theatre with her family.
After completing her schooling at SCEGGS Redlands, Cremorne, where Miss Hoare taught her English and Art, Nan enrolled at East Sydney Technical College in 1929 where her most memorable teacher was Phyllis Shillito. However, she was forced to discontinue her studies because of the Depression and thereafter learnt 'on the job’: first as a sign writer, then as a scarf and embroidery designer. On 4 March 1941, 'at the old stable’, 1 Vista Street, Mosman, she opened the business Annan Fabrics with her partner Annie Outlaw, née Simpson (1891-1991), an English secretary who had been awarded the OBE for her work with Prime Minister Lloyd George during the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. Annie had come to Sydney with her artist husband, Arthur, soon after their marriage in September 1922; she was Hon. Sec. of the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts when she met Nan, who had begun designing textiles in her Mosman home in the 1930s, characteristically using strong colours, clear lines and a preferred use of Australian imagery.
Annie had £100 and Nan had researched the viability of 'rapid fast’ dyes from Fahmann Industries in Frankfurt, supplied through Abel Lemon of Harrington Street, Sydney, which led to them establishing a screen-printing business at Mosman – called Annan from their two names – and to set about acquiring basic equipment and the requisite practical skills. While an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of screen-printing and dye mixing was obviously necessary in order to produce well-printed colourfast fabrics, it was also fundamental to MacKenzie’s design philosophy, which held that good design was dependent on appropriateness and a thorough knowledge of the particular processes involved in making a finished article. Outlaw’s creative contribution to the business was in dye mixing, a highly skilled task that allowed no margin for error.
In spite of supply problems and various other difficulties, during the war years in particular, Mackenzie and Outlaw achieved a remarkably wide range of excellent colours and found that their bright fabrics sold readily. Being bold and colourful designs in colour-fast dyes on sturdy cotton, most fabrics such as Rock Carving c.1945 (Powerhouse) – inspired by the Aboriginal artistic tradition of carving or painting pictures on rock and images of Australian fauna that recur in Aboriginal art and mythology – were well suited for curtains or other domestic furnishings. Some were also made up into dresses, beachwear and ties.
Annan designs became an international success, exhibited in Australia House, London, and at Cairo in 1947; at the Australian Display Centre, New York, in 1952; and in the Ideal Houses Exhibition at Sydney Town Hall in 1953. Over the years Mackenzie and Outlaw received several offers to go into large-scale commercial production, but they preferred to retain independent control of the studio through concentrating on individual projects and commissioned lengths for large retail stores such as David Jones. Mackenzie and Outlaw, who could screen-print an average of thirty-six metres a day, produced a wide range of fabrics, the vast majority featuring Australian flora or Aboriginal motifs. Their many commissions included fabrics for the office of the High Commissioner of Pakistan, the 'Australia Room’ of the P & O liner Himalaya , the Qantas offices in London, Honolulu, New York and Djakarta, the overseas and TAA passenger terminals at Mascot and Essendon, the University of NSW, the Sydney P & O offices and curtains in the dining room of Parliament House, Sydney. Field Marshall Montgomery chose for his home the pink and ochre version of their Kangaroo Hunt , a design exhibited at Australia House, London; this was also selected by Lintas Advertising Agency.
In the face of a flood of cheap imported American prints in the postwar years, however, it became much more difficult to keep the business viable; Annan Fabrics became increasingly dependent on architects’ commissions for printed fabrics for both private and public interiors. Despite the superb quality of their work and their undoubted success, the business was never financially secure. Living from commission to commission, Mackenzie and Outlaw were just able to keep afloat until 1954 when they were forced into liquidation over the production of street decorations for the Royal Visit. Having been awarded the subcontract, they worked on nothing else for months and were unable to sustain the loss when the contractor declared himself bankrupt. The business folded in 1955. By then Annie’s husband had died and she had returned to her native London, where she died on 17 January 1991, aged ninety-nine. She was always 'great fun’ to work with, Nan recollects.
From 1960 until she retired in 1974, Nan taught textile printing in the Design and Crafts Diploma Course at East Sydney Technical College. On 8 June 1963, she married Andrew Kenneth Kirkwood. She was still living at Mosman in 1995.
- Writers:
- Lorenzo, Catherine De
Sumner, Christina
staffcontributor
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2012
