Some of the flowers are on the kit

It’s a charming, albeit faintly ridiculous, sight to picture: a grown man spending two days working out whether a flower can sit on top of a logo on a football shirt without completely ruining the meaning of both. But for artist and designer Christian Jeffery, that’s sort of become the point.

He creates art using the football jersey as his starting point, bringing in sporting and regional history, fan culture and local traditions. He recently showed his work, in an exhibition titled Comfort Ye One Another, at the British Textile Biennial in Lancashire.

His hand-painted football jerseys have won plaudits from the art crowd and from football fans alike for their intricate embellishing of some of the most recognisable iconography of our time. They are chopped, cut and recut with unwieldy fabrics, detailed with paint strokes on polyester, a process that must’ve made the process like nailing soap to the wall. They exist as sincere objects in a deeply insincere time: slow, textured, a little awkward, filled with intentionality and the detours that efficiency culture keeps trying to leave for dead. Jeffrey takes an item we are used to seeing as mass-produced and hand-makes it instead.

Jeffery spent a decade as a designer for Adidas, deep inside the performance-sportswear machine — a world of marginal gains and factory optimisation, CAD software melting his processors — only to jib the lightweight spaceage technology for the craft, becoming of a man who began at his kitchen table, his paints spread in front of him. But, he insists, despite my constant prodding, this isn’t a rejection of the industry. His work is what happens when the industry’s principles are applied by a human hand and allowed to run amok.

In an era where design can be conjured with a prompt and a yawn, Jeffery is committed to the long, long way round. Each research path, each misstep, each “What have I started?” micro-panic adding to the a texture. This, in his understated way, has become a philosophy: the error, when it inevitably arrives, isn’t the problem. The error is the door.

Now, with a young son running rings around the room, the days of producing work at his kitchen table are over. I caught up with Christian in his studio at OOF Gallery in Tottenham and, despite the increase in scale of his operation and the attention it has garnered, the time fighting London traffic is worth it. His dedication to the craft isn’t going anywhere

Sam: Tell me about your process. It’s obviously extremely detailed — almost meditative. Is that important when you've got a two-and-a-half-year-old running around?

Christian: It makes me extremely grateful to have my studio. I did this for years at the kitchen table, which is manageable without a kid, and totally unmanageable when your two-year-old’s throwing spaghetti across the table and you’ve got a painting you've spent three months doing. It makes me grateful for a separate space. My son came to a recent exhibition and was monitored very closely once it was finished and high enough for him to not touch.

And did he appreciate the artworks?

He did not. But I gave him a model car. He was happy pushing it on the floor. No idea what was going on.

When you describe what you do to people who aren't a toddler — people who don’t work in the arts — how do you explain it? What do you say at a barbecue when someone asks, “So, Christian, what do you do?”

It is difficult to give the elevator pitch. I say I’m an artist and a designer and I make hand-painted inspired jerseys. It's easier if I show them my Instagram. People ask: “How many? Can you wear them?” And I say: they're not clothing, it's art. Showing them in a gallery helps people understand through the lens of art rather than clothing. There aren’t that many reference points, otherwise. Documenting the process helps show the thought, effort, and time behind each one. I'm not churning them out. Context is very important.

You worked as a designer at Adidas and now your canvas is literally one of the most mass-produced objects in sport. What does your work do when it takes performance out and focuses on detail? The material intimacy of something tangibly different to plastic and polish…

Well, I’m still a geek of football shirts. I love going to stores and seeing new things. But the industry is the way it is for a reason. It’s not about challenging that. It's self-expression. I can’t make a better jersey than Nike and don’t want to. They make high-performing products and that leads down a certain road. I’m on a different road.

I’ve been to factories and I’ve seen how fast they’re made and they need to be done that way. Inside that world the challenge is: How can we make it the most efficient? That’s exciting in its own way. But each one of mine takes a different amount of time. And it’s full of mistakes because it's painted. If you hand-paint a logo, it’s not going to be perfect. But that’s the joy. The designer sees the end result then normally the factory does it. But now I become the factory — wearing all these different hats — photographing it, communicating it…

Is there something you feel like you're returning to the object — a reappreciation of detail? What story are you trying to tell through your work?

I don’t know if there’s one overarching message. But I guess it’s about a DIY spirit — do what you love. You have to love it because it’s painful and takes so long. Everyone has a specific different thing, some more personal than others.

How long does a piece usually take? Do you ever wish it was quicker or is part of the beauty in its slowness?

Oh, I’m always thinking, “What have I started?” But it can be meditative — you’re emulating what a machine does in half a second in a month. Something like the England piece took a very, very long time. We started conversations at the beginning of the year — maybe seven months start-to-finish. You formulate the concept, design it, plan it before picking up a brush. Painting can be strenuous, but sometimes it's finding the pattern pieces and placement that takes the longest. Finding exactly where a logo should interact with a flower or the perfect point in the fabric where something can go through and in and out of the lettering... You create these moments that can really only be done by hand. I think showing in real life is important so people see those details. Because sometimes you’re painting rows of gold roses and thinking “What did I get myself into here? Why did I do this?” Then you wake up and go again. I guess as long as I’m proud of it, it’s worthwhile.

How important is an appreciation of the craft in this process?

Well, because each one’s different — I don’t use the same fabric twice — there’s so much that goes into something that’s hand-crafted that isn’t noticeable unless it’s explained. Something made by a machine often wouldn’t have that — or wouldn’t need that — but the obsession of trying four brands of fabric paint to get a black to come out the way you want… then waiting for paint to dry… and then doing it again — it can be a maddening repetitiveness.

But craft applies your physical self into something. You’re doing something that you don’t get if you’re sat at a computer doing it or removed by it being a factory process. And there’s a growing lack of patience [in our culture] and my work kind of sits completely opposite to that. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s an interesting wedge between what I do and sort of what’s happening in the world.

Does using football shirts reach people who wouldn’t usually be interested in artwork? The social aspect of what your work does — using such a recognisable canvas and how that brings people together — is something that feels important.

Well football brings people from different walks of life together anyway, so I can use the jerseys as a vehicle to tell a story or to put two people in a conversation — at a gallery or online — that they might not have had otherwise.

And someone might say, “Oh that looks like my nan’s curtains,” and then someone else loves it because it looks like their nan’s curtains.

A lot of what I do is just based on my own memories, or it’s research-based storytelling, and it kind of triggers people of different ages. Like, some shirts I reference I was literally six months old when they came out, but now I know and love them. A football shirt often has, you know, three logos on the front that all have massive emotive content behind them. Those logos trigger something and here’s a richness you can play with. And explaining it to people is best done in real life, because you see the weight of teh things—how heavy they are. They’re like a bad piece of product design, really. [laughs] If you were making a performance jersey you would not use curtain fabric. My trained designer brain kind of goes, “This is wrong.” But if you leave that behind it opens up a whole new avenue for you: No rules. Pick whatever fabric, whatever graphic. That’s interesting to me. That’s the fun.

I know you say this work isn’t in direct conflict with the hyper-efficiency of the industry, but what does it mean to make something by hand in an age of filtering, flattening, algorithms?

I think it shows commitment and love, really. And I’m pretty stubborn about not using it. If I started doing that it kind of defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to do and it sort of drifts into territory that I don’t really want to be in. And I’m not saying, like, big companies shouldn’t use [machines] — they’re obviously trying to achieve different things, and I completely get that.

But for me, research is so important — going down paths, talking to people, discovering things along the way. AI kind of shortcuts everything. You go from A to D without any of the bits in the middle.

That would remove the whole craft element of it, right? Like, it’s not just the physical action of craft, but it’s the way you get there, too. Because what you’re talking about isn’t just the end product, it’s enjoying the journey. Instead of just frictionlessly skipping out B and C and going straight from A to D, it’s like… I might go A to B, and then be like — actually — what if there’s a different kind of B? Or what if I want to go to E and then I’ll do C later? It all needs to become whole in the end, but the journey is what it’s about.The uncertainty. The detour. That is the craft.

That’s a perfect way of describing what’s in my head. My ideas end up in different places because of taking that time. Painting is unpredictable — things react differently, mistakes happen, and that means you pivot, and I think that’s where ideas come from. I could type something into AI and get a perfectly good design back but it just… it just makes me uncomfortable.

It loses the unexpected.

Exactly.

Do you ever have a fear of beginning something? Does designing from shirts — a medium you know so intimately — kind of remove that blank-canvas fear? Because you’ve got something there already — history, fabric, context — rather than staring at white space?

Yeah, I mean, if you sat me in front of a blank canvas, I’d have a breakdown. Everything I do now is just a combination of what I’ve learned in the industry and applied to art. It wouldn’t exist without those ten years working.

And it has to be personal. People are clever — they see through it if it’s not. You have to love it because otherwise it’s way too hard, it takes too long. You might think no one else cares — but some people do.

My work kind of combines football and interiors and craft and storytelling — it’s just the product of me. I don’t sew because I can’t sew. I cut, I paint, and I take it to a seamstress. It keeps the momentum going that way. And every fabric is different — it’s experimentation. I go: “What does that look like on top of that paint?” Then that’s like two days of figuring out. It’s fun and maddening. Unknown and slow.

That tension you’re describing — between control and letting go — feels central to the work. Like you’re chasing precision but also accepting that the human hand will betray you, and that becomes the point.

It’s like I’m striving for imperfection. Or maybe it’s striving for perfection but knowing you’re gonna fall short, right? Like, I’ll try and paint a logo as accurately as possible and I’m kidding myself it’s gonna look better — and then the lion’s face is gonna be a bit wonky because my hand’s shaking, and the next line isn’t perfect either — but that’s great. You sort of set the bar high and then you fall short — and the mistakes, you embrace them, you pivot here, pivot there — and there’s, like, happiness in that struggle, you know what I mean? Sometimes it’s only when I take a close-up photo that I realise how wonky that line is — but that’s important to show that. Because otherwise what’s the point? I could’ve just screen-printed it.