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.