A textile in use
Two people sit together beneath a pale blanket, cups held close, with the surrounding bushland softly out of focus. The fabric is visible as a weight and a surface: it folds around shoulders, catches the light along its edge and creates a shared enclosure within the larger landscape.
In Jaccob McKay’s Waverley Mills Recycled collection, textiles move beyond the usual interior setting. The photographs place blankets among trees and fallen timber, letting their colours sit beside the browns and greens of the bush. The outdoor context gives their softness a clear contrast.
Colour, fold and repetition
A stack of blankets presents the products more directly. Each folded layer contributes a band of colour, with the edges making thickness visible. The composition is simple, but it records something a flat swatch cannot: the way the fabric occupies space.
The photographs of people wrapped in the blankets introduce looser shapes. Shoulders, elbows and knees change the direction of the folds. A textile that looked geometric in the stack becomes irregular in use, while retaining the same muted palette. That change is one of the collection’s most useful visual threads.
The object and its surroundings
The series is not a technical account of textile manufacturing. It is a photographic study of the finished blankets as objects in the world. Their surfaces are given context through bark, moss, clothing and the light beneath trees, making softness and warmth visible without a catalogue of claims.
The original Waverley Mills collection brings product photography and portraiture together. A blanket is shown folded, draped and shared. Across those states, it remains an ordinary object with a strong material presence, capable of changing the small space immediately around the people using it.
