The textile artist, literary art director, muralist and fashion designer Cressida Bell – Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter and Virginia Woolf’s great-niece – invites me into her studio in Hackney Central. I am greeted by a wash of colour: geometric dots, kimono-hued patterns, a ménagerie of lampshades, assistants, an Indian bust by her ceramicist and art historian father Quentin Bell and designs, which are all ready to be sent to individual clients, major London museums and literary magazines.
Looking at her I fancy I see in her eyes some sort of fog, the Woolfian fog, the Vanessa Bell rictus of those arch-lintelled, roundish eyes – I would say “with the impenetrability of a tornado”, but then that would put my visit to a boho corner of civilised productivity irruptively and teasingly out of kilter. (And I’m sure that if Cressida had a penny for every time she’d been told she had Bloomsbury eyes, then she’d have a studio of Anselm Kiefer-like proportions.)
