Interview Mark Hooper Photography Julian Broad

Published in No 12

Speaking to Cameron Short and his wife Janet Tristram, co-founders of Bonfield Block Printers in Dorset, in the West of England, it’s tempting to talk in clichés: how they escaped the rat race of city life to establish a rural idyll, developing a creative way of life that is intricately connected to the land that surrounds them.

In many ways it’s the fulfillment of a dream many of us have had, particularly during the lockdowns of 2020 — and it’s heartening to see someone who’s been there and done it. “Well, I don’t feel I’ve been there and done it! Doing it perhaps,” demurs Short. “We’re still making mistakes and hopefully learning from them. And ultimately — I wouldn’t say I’d had this moment of epiphany 10, 12 years ago and kind of seen the future. It was more a case of — I wasn’t very well, if I’m brutally honest with you. I’d worked in big advertising agencies at the sharp end of creative departments, where expectations were sky-high. Everyone was after winning the next D&AD Pencil. It’s an extremely cut-throat, competitive business, and I’m not a politician, which was my downfall really, in terms of moving up the hierarchy. I just found being penned in an office, day after day, was beyond painful. It felt like such an unnatural state. And I think the industry changed also — not for the better. There was more power in the client and account management side and less trust in the creative side, and I just got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like a battery hen, laying ideas not eggs! But they were going nowhere. The last office I was in didn’t even have a window. And with the pressure and the expectation and having to justify your salary: it was too much.”

In his words, Short “had a bit of a meltdown.” Having taken time off work for stress, he remembers how Tristram said to him, “Resign, Cam. We’ll find another way.” He did — and they did. While it may have felt he had no choice, it still takes a certain amount of bravery to make that change, I suggest.

“Totally, I think a lot of people are held back, quite understandably, by that fear that they’re not qualified to do anything else,” Short says. “Particularly if they’ve got responsibilities and kids or are looking after people — it’s a very difficult thing to walk away from a secure salary, even if you’re hating it. So, lots of people just carry on — and I would never stand here and say they’re wrong. But what I would say — and I say this to my kids — is you mustn’t be frightened of uncertainty. People can make change work for them, and I guess we have to a small degree proved that you can move to the dark side of the moon! We’re in a very rural spot, very quiet, we don’t have a lot of footfall, but we manage, by hook or crook, to make a living and have a certain quality of life that I just didn’t have in London, despite the salary.”

The catalyst that prompted the move to the West Country was, for Short, as simple as it was definitive. “I was leafing through a copy of World of Interiors magazine, in 2005, and there was an article about a blockprinter called Marthe Armitage. She’s been block printing since the 1960s and printing her own wallpaper — doing it for herself, not commercially — but she got noticed by local people who started to ask her to print wallpaper for them. And that’s how her business started. She’s in her 90s now, and she still works with her daughter Jo. It was like a coupe de foudre moment, you know — a lightning bolt. I’d always enjoyed drawing and design. I thought, this is fantastic, this might be a way out — it was an opportunity to use my hands as well as my skills as an art director. So to bring all that into play and be my own boss…”

Short sent her a speculative email and received a reply inviting the couple round for tea. “I went away totally enthused, thinking, I’m never going to be a Marthe Armitage… but I could be a Cameron Short!” The pair now create and handmake their prints, wallpaper and fabric designs, using a 1904 cylinder proofing press installed in their beautifully restored Grade II-listed Georgian house.

The inspirations for their designs are rooted in nature, drawing on Short’s childhood living on a farm in Hampshire and Tristram’s upbringing, first in New Zealand and then Samoa (her mother’s birthplace), before finding herself in England aged 17, where she studied printmaking at art school, as well as taking a degree in fashion.

It’s clear there is a yearning for the rural life in both of them — and, in an age where everyone talks about the “narrative” in their work, there is a genuinely lyrical aspect to Bonfield designs. “Yeah, I think so,” says Short. “My background is the countryside and growing up with quite eccentric stories from farmers and traveling folk, so I bring all of that into play. Really, it’s the story of rural craft, farming, agriculture, folklore, wild fauna — in that way, hopefully, we’re making people feel some kind of connection that maybe they can’t put their finger on.”


While admitting a love of “pattern for its own sake, random design and primitivism,” and having been introduced to the traditional tapa cloths of Polynesia by Tristram — Cameron still feels drawn to local myths and legends. “There’s something in storytelling that I’ve always warmed to — characters, humanity in all its shades, social history. I think we live in a world obsessed with urban life — the “glamorous” life in inverted commas. Actually, that may be changing with the lockdown and I think a more sustainable life is well overdue. So, I guess that’s where I was coming from — the memories from my childhood, not being wealthy perhaps, but rich in spirit. We were surrounded by beauty and mystery. The woods, the copses… I used to help my uncle with the hay cart. I’ve got a wonderful wound in my hand where a bale hook went through it when I was eight years old — that’s one I’m particularly proud of!”

Short has plenty of opportunity for fresh scars now, having learned to lay hedges and dig ditches to supplement his income when he first moved West. “If I can lay out a chain of hedge, I do it just for pleasure. It’s wonderful to literally see the fruits of your labors at the end of the day. You certainly get that with what we’re doing now. It gives a lot of joy. And you need that in life.”

Wondering why they should both end up in Dorset, Short enthuses about how the county “has a magnetism, for various reasons.” For a start, there is no motorway (the equivalent of a freeway) in the whole county, meaning the only route west is via the meandering A303, which takes you past Stonehenge as it trundles from Hampshire to Devon. “It almost feels like you’re going the wrong way,” says Short. “Like you’re not supposed to infiltrate these places because they’re not designed for modern life. That’s one of the reasons I always felt the pull of Dorset. It’s not all roses obviously, and sometimes we feel very isolated. We have to balance our professional life — which is very modest — with our family life. We’ve got three young children who need our guidance and nurturing and love and… time. We do sometimes feel frustrated that we can’t give the work as much time as we would like. But we just need to be patient, because there will be a point when we have more time for that.” Above all, the word Short returns to in describing his new family life in the wilds of West Dorset is “fortuitous.”

“When we left London, I heard someone say, ‘Leap and the net will appear,’ — and that was quite a nice image in my mind, even if I wasn’t sure if it would play out that way. But the net did appear for us. We had to work hard for it of course. And a lot of strange things happened that just felt so… fortuitous. It’s the only word. It was the complete antithesis to everything I’d been experiencing in my life in London. I felt like I’d landed back in my childhood, and it made me feel really calm. And despite the trepidation in a way, having no income — we had a little saved at least. And Janet loved it too. It was the most beautiful environment, and a wonderful place to start being creative.”

Bonfield Block Printers

Mark Hooper is an award-winning editor and writer. His book, The Great British Tree Biography is published by Pavilion He lives in Kent, England. mark-hooper.com and @markhooper

Julian Broad shoots for German Vogue, Armani, D la Repubblica, IWC and Harrods, among others. julianbroad.com and @julian_broad_studio