Daunton Marbling

Marbling is the kind of craft I used to assume was a museum thing. Endpapers in old books. Florentine notebooks in the gift shop. Nichola Daunton makes it feel current, and a little louder than I expected.

From the Kent coast to north east London

She works from a studio in north east London now, after years on the Kent coast, floating pigment on a prepared bath of size, drawing it into pattern with combs and rakes, then laying paper across the surface to lift the design off in a single pass. The mechanics are centuries old. The colour decisions are not. Nichola comes to marbling from a background in collage and illustration, and that shows in the palettes she chooses. Candy chevrons, deep-blue polka dots, snakes cut from double-marbled sheets. Nothing antiquarian about any of it.

Marbling sits on the Heritage Crafts Red List as endangered, which is why I wanted her in the launch cohort. The technique is unforgiving. You get one chance per sheet, every sheet is a moment of weather on water, and the maker is only ever guiding pigment, never quite commanding it. That tension is the whole point, and you can read it in the patterns: an underlying order, and then something the paper decided for itself.

One chance per sheet

Her practice spans hand-marbled paper sheets in two sizes, paper chain garland kits that lean unapologetically domestic, hand-cut illustrations built from double-marbled stock, and giclée prints. She also runs marbling workshops, which feels important. The craft only survives if more people know how to do it.

Everything she sells through The Haud is made-to-order, with a lead time of five to ten working days. No two sheets are alike. That is the offer, and it is the constraint.