Victoria and Albert Museum

This is where it all started for me as a 16 year old, and this is where I leave the journey through the V & A Ceramic Halls. These humble pots still have the voice of their creators and that is some test of time. Pieces like these underline my own relationship with clay, and they reinforce all that is good about pot making.
I am preparing for another journey, back to the future, Spain has been very wet for the past two months and I wonder what I will find when I get there. The boot is loaded with Spencroft's SRB8-G clay (ridiculous I know, but the Spanish stuff is just too high in iron for my work) and CTM's stains. There is a storm in Biscay tomorrow spreading northerly into the Channel so it is going to be a rough crossing, all that ballast will be essential me thinks!

Lucie Rie's Studio

I am still in the V & A Ceramic Halls, and this is Lucie Rie's Studio, lovingly re-assembled behind a glass wall. Lovely to see, but it was a bit clean!

The Gloucester Candlestick

The ceramic galleries were marvelous but this three foot candlestick is actually what I went to find. You see it is in the book “A Children’s Story” by A S Byatt, I wrote about it a few months ago. The story begins with one of the characters in the West Kensington Museum (now called the Victoria and Albert Museum) drawing this very candlestick. He is an apprentice potter who has run away form the potteries and is living in the museum as a stowaway. He is captivated by this piece and all the faces and creatures and wants to make it in clay, so he draws it. And here it is on display in the Renaissance exhibition. Made between 1104 -13, it was commissioned by Abbot Peter and the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter, now Gloucester Cathedral and was probably for use on an alter. One of the inscriptions calls the candlestick a work of virtue and light and darkness.

And also, for your delight, a couple of close-up photographs of the bosses on a huge crucifix. Tiny enameled owls of no more than three centimeters, they will definitely end up on one of my pots! Have a look at Hannah McAndrews owl plate here, its gorgeous.

Natasha Kerr, a new aquisition at the V&A

Hanging “At The End Of The Day” 2007 Painted and printed linen.

If I didn’t or couldn’t make ceramics then I would go back to making textile art. This is an absolute beauty of a piece by Natasha Kerr and measures about a meter wide.
Natasha Kerr, born 1968, is a London-based textile artist who is known for her unusual one-off hangings. She transfers family photographs onto antique bed linen, then uses various techniques, including painting, stitching and piecing together of various fabrics, to complete each work.This is the first example of Kerr’s work in the V&A textile collection.

Bernard Palissy at the V & A

Dish with snake relief, French 1570-90
Bernard Palissy was the most original French potter. His most famous work is decorated with plants and animals cast from life and glazed in vivid colours. Such pieces combine Palissy’s experiments in ceramics with his love of natural history. This is the potter I would most like to meet in history; he would have been an extraordinary potter in his time. For nearly sixteen years Palissy tried to imitate Chinese porcelain, however through a succession of utter failures, he worked with the utmost diligence, without a gleam of hope. This story verges on the tragic. At times he and his family were reduced to the bitterest poverty; he burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house to feed the fires of his kiln. Meanwhile, he endured the reproaches of his wife, who, with her little family clamouring for food, evidently regarded her husband's endeavors as insanity. All these struggles and failures are most faithfully recorded by Palissy in one of the simplest and most interesting pieces of autobiography ever written, expensive and difficult to obtain in an English translation see here.

Polito’s Menagerie. Staffordshire England, about 1830
This is a mantelpiece ornament and shows the entrance to a famous traveling menagerie. Although it is made of inexpensive earthenware, the elaborate moulded and painted decoration would have made it more costly than other pieces. It makes a high point in quality before Staffordshire potters began making cheaper, simpler moulded figures. Lead-glazed earthenware, painted in enamels.

Victoria and Albert Museum

Three ancient pieces form the Victoria and Albert Museum today. First this beautiful small shallow bowl, the label says Gubbio Italian dish 1520 – 30 Tin glazed earthenware. Obviously hump mounded, you could see the potters hand marks on the back.

Second, a fairly large jar from Southern Italian tomb about 200 BC. This Italio-Greek jar with winged female heads and winged love gods follows a typical Italian shape. Earthenware painted with black and white slips and other pigments.

Third, and my favourate from Iraq, probably Basra 850 - 900
This tiny bowel is reduction fired lustre. Iraqi potters were the first to use lustre on ceramics. Around 850, they adapted the technique for glass making. Lustre wear was practiced through out the Middle East. By about 1150, the main centre was Kashan, in Iran. A treatise written there in 1301 by the potter Abu’l-Qasim contains detailed technical information on how to make lusterwares which he described as “shining like the light of the sun”.

Chihuly in the foyer of the Victoria and Albert Museum

This chandelier is by Dale Chihuly and it dominates in the entrance hall to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is the first thing you see when you arrive. I think Chihuly’s baubles (and I use that word with all it's loaded irony) are astonishing, but one chandelier is more than enough as seen here. Inside this work is saccharine and lavish and on the same footing as the luxury items in department stores. Outside however the glass comes to life in a whole new way. In 2005 Chihuly at Kew was a major exhibition for the American artist. It was stunning and this is where these works work. Chihulys glass sculpture speaks to me and informs my botanical ceramic work, I love the struggle and dilemma of the site location and the disastrous impact this has, it happens with all applied arts, they need to find their place, and then they work. See the artists site here.

First post - The Victoria and Albert Museum, Ceramic Halls

Butterfly
Made in Sweden Stockholm, modeled about 1956 by Anders Liljefors and sand cast. It is a very beautiful butterfly; who would have thought of using this massively grogged clay body for such a a delicate creature, but it is strangely delicate. Partly glazed it was produced by Gustavsberg. Casting liquid clay in damp sand was a technique adapted by Liljefors and was previously used to make bathroom tiles. 11 inches wide. V&A Museum London.

James Tower (1919 – 88)
This vase was made in 1957 in Wiltshire England. It is earthenware, with black slip over incised wax resist, under a white tin glaze. Also beautiful and about 24 inches across the widest part. V & A Museum.

Wall Plaque in shape of a bird
From Finland, Helsinki, and made about 1960 Made by Birger Kaipianen at Arabia. Glazed earthenware, with applied mirror glass and black glazed “pearls”. This witty bird is typical of Birger Kaipianinen’s work and was one of his favourite motifs. He crafted larger three-dimensional birds out of ceramic beads, watch faces and wire. About 20 inches wide, totally crazy stuff! V & A Museum.

This is the first part of my day out at the V&A. I went just for the new ceramic halls and spent about three hours in there. I did however gravitate towards the Renaissance exhibition too, so there will be some pictures from those exhibitions in the coming days.

Plymouth City Council

Trumpets, more trumpets and a fanfare! If you want your bins emptied this morning and you live in Plymouth you get to feast your eyes on the Domestic Bliss vase which I made last year. I should point out it’s not on the bin page (how awful would that be), it’s on the blooming opening page, in other words; the main page, and the 250,000 people who live in Plymouth, if they log on to their council website today they get to see it. It might be gone tomorrow, like Enid’s Faraway Tree; the land of Dyson will be gone in a few hours, thank goodness for screen grabs eh? Click to see.