The Memory of Plants in Craft

Cultural context

Pottery and ceramics have always carried plants. Sometimes they were painted, sometimes more moulded into relief, or a stem drawn through wet slip before the kiln closed.

Across thousands of years and many ceramic traditions, flowers and leaves have persisted in a way that almost no other motif can match. But as with art, each tradition has made that motif from its time mean something specific to reflect it.

In Chinese celadon (a type of green-glazed ceramic made in China), the lotus carried Buddhist meaning as a symbol of purity, long before any European collector encountered it. Ottoman Iznik potters worked for the imperial court and developed a precise vocabulary to represent tulips, carnations, hyacinths and roses, exact enough that a dish from that era can still be dated by the combination it uses. Both traditions continued on their own terms for centuries, independent of whether Europe was paying attention.

Europe did start to play close attention, and not always honestly. As nineteenth century industrialisation gathered pace, factories such as Minton and Wedgwood filled middle class British homes with botanical and chinoiserie ornament, much of it borrowing directly from the Chinese and Ottoman visual languages already described, stripped of their original religious and courtly meaning and resold as generic signifiers of the exotic. This is the same extraction where empires separated plants, and the visual languages built around them, from the people who gave them meaning, to then patent, rename and sell the result back to the world as luxury.

The twentieth century studio pottery movement was different. It positioned itself against that industrial model, but its own origins were collaborative rather than singular. Bernard Leach founded the movement most visibly from Britain, but the philosophy behind it was built with Yanagi Soetsu, the Japanese philosopher who coined the term mingei for the beauty of ordinary handmade objects, and Hamada Shoji, the potter who became Leach lifelong friend and co founder, choosing to leave Japan and help establish the Leach Pottery in St Ives in 1920.

What emerged was not a British idea exported outward, nor a Japanese philosophy imported wholesale, but a genuinely shared position built between England and Japan which was that clay should stay legible as clay, and that firing, ash and salt were collaborators in the work rather than problems to be engineered away.

It was into this movement, more than seventy years old by the time they arrived, that Nigel and Suzy Atkins founded Le Don du Fel in 1977, not by choice alone but because they had been priced out of setting up a pottery in England. Suzy came to clay at age twenty seven, through an evening class taken almost by accident, in a craft that had only recently begun offering women a route to serious professional standing rather than domestic hobby status. Nigel brought industrial design training from the Royal College of Art. Their workshop is one small, specific instance within a much larger and still ongoing set of traditions, not its culmination.

Molecules

Nigel and Suzy Atkins' work is rooted in salt glazing, a process that deliberately surrenders part of the finished surface to chemistry. At peak temperature, salt is thrown into the kiln. It vaporises and reacts with the silica in the clay to form the glaze itself. The potter controls the form, the firing and the timing, but never the exact surface and fire, salt and atmosphere complete what the hand started.

In the world

Now

Plant / material

Clay. Earth.