Pottery fragments

[shewhomust]

"Slice a spade into any British garden," said a Guardian editorial (previewing an exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath earlier this year), "and you will almost certainly find a chip of blue and white pottery, enough in total to make a dinner service for every family in the country. Gardening lends itself to contemplation, and the shards of delicately patterned porcelain prompt all sorts of musings: was there an imperial catastrophe which prompted all Victorians to rush outside and smash their best plates in mourning? Or did clumsy servants use herbaceous borders to hide the aftermath of kitchen accidents?"

In less wealthy areas, substitute "earthenware" for "delicately patterned porcelain", and fields for gardens; you can't - or at least, I can't - walk the edge of a ploughed field without seeing, and picking up, fragments of pottery. durham_rambler jokes that I am collecting a willow pattern dinner service, one piece at a time. In fact it isn't all willow - it isn't even all blue and white - but I'm impressed how small a chip can be and still be identifiably willow.

This post, which has been simmering at the back of my mind for months, was triggered by musecrack, a constant source of strange and wonderful images. Specifically, three pictures of the work of Caroline Slotte. She creates a kind of sculpture from old ceramics, broken and remade, creating a spray of roses from the tiniest - and sharpest - of shards, using a pattern of cracks to outline a portrait on a dish. It's astonishingly painstaking work, and what charms me about it is not so much the created object (which I find difficult to judge from photographs) as the nature of her response to the raw materials - that I understand.

Meanwhile, in another part of the Guardian, Margaret Drabble visited the Potteries, retracing J.B. Priestley's 'English Journey'. "We saw earthenware in various stages of firing - 'green' and 'biscuit' are words that linger - but the room that impressed me most was monochrome and stacked with white pots. It looked like a film set, awaiting action. At one point I noted the mysterious and suggestive words 'Dark Felicity' handwritten on a piece of paper on top of a pile of plates, and was told that this was the name of one of Burleigh's traditional, blue-flowered patterns. You could buy your crockery in Dark Felicity or Pale Felicity." Dark Felicity and Pale Felicity: they sound like nineweaving's sister goddesses.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

You should go mudlarking on the Thames foreshore at low tide. I do that every time I visit London, and I always find fascinating relics. Ceramic shards from as far back as Roman times are most common. It's an education.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I saw a wonderful exhibition at Tate Modern: a huge cabinet built to hold all the things gathered from the foreshore - a drawer full of blue & white, a drawer full of clay pipes, another full of mobile phones...

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh, how lovely! I have an unreasoning adoration of blue and white china. I still have a shard I found in childhood on a tip.

Now I want a Slotte, as well a fragment of shipwrecked china.

And my goddess (the Pale one) is tickled to be crockery. Doubtless a jug.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I see nothing unreasoned about it!

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Max collects the shards from when we're digging the garden. He claims that they are all either (a) Roman pottery or (b) dinosaur bones. I think we may have a budding archaeologist on our hands.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

And are they (a) Roman pottery or (b) dinosaur bones? And how was your trip to London?

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

(a) No. Well, probably not. Especially not the willow patterny stuff.
(b) Definitely not
and (not c) It was good. I shall probably write about it at some point.