Illustrated Ceramic Plates

This spring I began a series of stencil cut designs on hand thrown white earthenware plates. I make these on the wheel starting with a pre-rolled round slab and bringing up the rim as it's a quicker way to produce lots of plates to illustrate on, rather than throwing them from scratch.

Like most of my work they feature funny animal themed designs. I started with a joyful dancing crocodiles layout. The crocodiles were drawn and cut out on paper, then arranged on the leather hard plate and a layer of liquid green slip painted over them. once this is beginning to solidify, after maybe 15 minutes, the paper is located beneath the slip layer with a pin tool, sometimes detective work is required to find where they are if the slip is thick! Then the paper is peeled back and the crocodiles imprint in white is left, ready for finer illustrated details to be added with underglaze colours. The plate is bisque fired and finally given a layer of clear transparent glaze and fired to higher temperature for the second time.

In surface pattern I really like a repeat design but not an exact pattern, I want it to have unexpected variation and ideally suggest a story. Narrative pattern, as its known, is what fascinates me on the useful household objects which populate our daily lives. I always find myself drawn to the ancient pots and tools in museums which people from other centuries have decorated with their favourite animals, people and plant motifs. The folk art stylised animals that often feature on ancient pots and plates inspire my contemporary versions, like these cats playing with mice in a spring meadow.