Tiwi Fabric Gallery

Textile Design

All textile designs are based on original artworks by Tiwi Design artists . All designs are hand screen printed onto cotton, linen and silk. A selection of fabrics are available to purchase on-line by the metre. Contact us for more information. There are many designs for you to choose from. Please click on a thumbnail to see each design.

Textile design process

Tiwi Design has been printing textiles since the early 1980's. The purpose built textile printing workshop is run by Osmond Kantilla, a master printer with over 20 years practical experience of printing textiles at Tiwi Design along with his assistant Alan Kerinauia.

Osmond supervises the translation of original artworks onto screens and manages the production of the hand printed fabrics. Osmond has designed screens himself and enjoys the artistic process of mixing colours and matching them to fabrics and designs. Osmond is currently training a young apprentice Alfie Purantatameri to assist in the screen printing studio

In the past many of the original artworks were transferred onto large format silk screens through handcutting and painted stencils. Nowadays the use of photographic methods has replaced this intricate and time consuming process.

Tiwi Design currently has three 13 metre long tables which are used to hand silkscreen print the textiles, t-shirts and t-towels. We have a commercial oven in which to cook the fabric and set the water based inks.

Tiwi Design produces approximately 500 metres of fabric a week during the dry season and gives daily demonstrations of the screen printing process to visiting tourists.