Translucent lights, tiles and earthy bowls - plants in ceramics

I went to the Geffrye Museum on London's Kingsland Road the other day. This time, however, I did not come for the excellent herb and period gardens behind the museum buildings (strongly recommended if you haven't been already) nor the permanent display but for the annual fair Ceramics in the City.

Browsing and wishing for a better budget, I was particularly fascinated by the work of two artists who both had been inspired by nature. Their styles, though, within the context of a ceramics fair could hardly be more different. It is precisely this spectrum of working with - and being inspired by - plants that fascinates me most: whether in the garden or in art, applied arts, crafts and - ultimately - science. 

tea lights featuring snow drops and gorse

But to come back to the fair. One stall offered tea light holders and illuminated objects (for want of a better word) made of porcelain. Satiny and matt white, fragile and translucent, they are created by Amy Cooper who lives and works in Cornwall. On her website she cites the coastal environment as well as gardens and woodland as her inspiration. Her sea urchin light sculptures left a strong enough impression on me that I remembered having seen them before: in spring, among thousands of other craft products by dozens of artists when we visited the Cornwall Crafts Association Gallery in Trelissick, Cornwall.

Here at the Geffrye Museum the focus was more on the lights that featured plants and woodland scenes. The process to create these pieces, I learned, is to cast them (slipcast, to be precise), fettle and bisque fire them, then a stencil - hand cut from Amy's own drawings -  is applied and the surface around it is sandblasted until the motif stands proud. Finally, they are fired at a high temperature and diamond polished to give that lovely satiny look and feel.

Light objects that feature e.g. bind weed (bottom left) and brambles (bottom right)

The result, as you can see in the pictures, are gently shimmering lights with shadowy silhouettes of an umbelliferous plant overgrown with bindweed, a little piece of meadow with dandelion and plantain, a bramble hedge, gorse or a sparse woodland, to name a few. They have a romantic, almost magical feel to them, reminiscent of illustrations in fairy tale books of yore.


The other artist had gone down a very different route. Instead of translucent, fragile porcelain she uses "proper" clay that instantly lends an earthy feel. On her website, Lisa Ellul confesses: "I've always had a love of nature and been fascinated by the beautiful natural structures and textures found in plants, bark and seed pots. It is this natural theme that inspires my ceramics."

Tiles with imprints of flowers, leaves and seeds showed the latters delicacy and intricacies up close, very much like cards or pictures with pressed flowers. Which, in essence, these tiles are - except, of course, that the actual flowers have been removed after being pressed into the raw clay tile and only their imprint is left, made to stand out by giving them a wash with oxides before the final firing. Sometimes a bit of gold leaf is added to focus on details and presumably give depths.

Beautiful as the tiles are, it was the bowls and "seed pods" I loved best. These were constructed from very thin clay, rolled into tubes or cones - looking almost like cinnamon bark or, in other cases, crepes I thought. These tubes and cones, too, had been imprinted with plant material such as sage or lavender leaves and bark and the details picked out in oxide washes and perhaps gold leaf. They were then layered and assembled into bowls, platters or sculpture-like "seed pods". Lisa describes them as having an "almost bone like" surface "with fossilised leaf patterns or inlayed textures", which I think sums it up pretty well.