Catching up.

It has been a very busy few weeks and I am only now looking back over my photos. Whilst I was in London for Ceramics in the City I called into the V and A. The image above is a little owl on the base of a Renaissance cross. I like these small images and this one in particular is a great little fellow. In the shop there were these other owls. Also very wonderful. These are reproductions of early slipware owls from the ceramics gallery. I don't know who they are by but the large platter is also by the same potter. If anybody knows let me know so I can fill in the gaps.

The above image is a large trunk also from the renaissance gallery. Sometimes looking at images on other objects sparks off an idea. I find the lack of scale quite appealing, sheep and magpies all the same size, just so decorative. I was also attracted to the decorative arrangement of the oak leaves on the large bottle below. A few objects like these sets my mind buzzing. I might not use the ideas straight away but they tend to lodge somewhere in the back of my mind until I need them.

Here is Hannah at her stall at the Geoffrye Museum. I've included a picture of Prue Cooper's wonderful plates and one of my stall. The three of us are all working with slipware but our work is very different. Prue's plates have a great sense of whimsy with their combination of words and images.

This last image is of some plates on my mother's wall. These plates were on my grandmother's wall all the time I was growing up. My grandfather won them at a fun fair. This suggests that they would have been really inexpensive. But there is something about them that has just lodged in the back  of my mind all these years. Influences and ideas come from all sorts of places even when we aren't looking for them.