At first glance you could be forgiven for mistaking the butter dishes, salt boxes and serving platters adorned with the figures of soldiers or fair maidens as pieces from another time. Created in the perfectly imperfect tradition of English slipware, Sophie Wilson’s ceramics look as if they belong in a decorative arts museum or perhaps on the kitchen shelves in an English aristocrat’s country pile.
“England has an incredible history of ceramics, and it is often a wonderfully dauby, clumsy tradition,” Ms. Wilson, 50, said from her Dorset studio. Her signature slipware — a style associated with the Staffordshire potteries of the 17th century — is created by coating semihard red clay pieces with liquid white clay (the “slip”). The wet surface is then etched to reveal the red clay beneath using the centuries-old decorative technique called sgraffito.
The designs on Ms. Wilson’s ceramics, sold under the name 1690, are peppered with literary, folk and art references, spanning 16th-century English blackwork embroidery, 18th-century botanical prints of the German botanist Johann Christoph Volkamer and the modernist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
The aim is not to recreate the past, Ms. Wilson said, but to give “an interpretation of something that exists in the memory; I love to think I’m bringing this tradition into contemporary homes in a tiny way.”
She also tries to reflect different aspects of life. A 35-centimeter (almost 14-inch) plate etched with the words “As the rose so is life,” a phrase that Ms. Wilson saw on a 18th-century pillbox, is available with three choices of decoration: two men holding hands, two women holding hands and a man and woman holding hands. “Decorative objects become comfortable and familiar over time and so are great vehicles for communicating important memories or messages,” she said. “I want my children to be completely au fait with all kinds of love, so I made a point of creating work which represents all kinds of attraction and endearment.”
She Made Her Own
Those with an appetite for bohemian interiors may have encountered Ms. Wilson’s former home, Crowland Manor, on Instagram, where she regularly posted product photographs taken in its surroundings. It was an artfully ramshackle and unmodernized manor house built in 1690 — hence her brand’s name — in the Lincolnshire fenlands, a naturally marshy area in eastern England.
In 2017, just after her youngest child started school, she opened a store in the manor’s entrance hall “to cover the cost of weekly groceries,” she said. She recently described it as “a Diagon Alley-ish sort of place, dark and mysterious,” with block-print textiles, handmade soaps and homemade pickles for sale.
She wanted to add ceramics to her stock, but after a local artisan let her down in 2019, she began to make her own. Clay, she said, struck her as “a brilliant companion to ideas” and, as a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art who had studied sculpture, she learned quickly. She started sharing her work on Instagram, and inquiries from international sellers soon followed.
Collector interest in ceramics has surged in recent years both in the primary and secondary markets, as seen, for example, in new fairs such as Ceramic Brussels, which debuted in January, and an auction record for the Austrian artist Lucie Rie, a 406,800-euro ($441,573) sale achieved in December 2023 at Bonhams in Paris.
Established art fairs and galleries, such as the Frieze fairs, have been dedicating more space to the medium. Early this month Frieze London had the fairs’ first area dedicated exclusively to ceramics: a section called “Smoke” that showcased ceramic artwork reflecting Indigenous and diasporic histories.
Ms. Wilson said she believed the current enthusiasm for handmade ceramics suggested a pendulum swing away from throwaway consumer culture. “When everything is boiled down to ones and zeros, what we crave is anomaly,” she said. “There is something about the flaws and the erratic nature of working in clay that is inescapably human.”
Rather than using a potter’s wheel, Ms. Wilson constructs pieces by hand. She said the gradual building up and joining of clay is more time-consuming and risky as air pockets may form, but the results are more “individual and instinctive.”
The 1690 Candili Chandelier, for example, comprises more than 50 ceramic components, including the chandelier’s central column, the candle cups and some decorative ornaments (2,040 pounds, or $2,648).
Each of the pieces is created in two halves, molded from red clay. Once the halves are joined, a hole is created through the center of each shape for suspension and then it is allowed to dry a little before being dipped in liquid white clay.
Liquid red clay then is quickly trailed over the surface while both clays are still mobile — then the piece is shaken, what the ceramics world calls “joggled,” to create a marbled effect on the surface. The piece then is dried on a rod, part of a rack that was specially designed to ensure the decoration is not smudged.
The rod is removed from each piece once it is sufficiently dry, but before the clay can shrink around it. The shape then is allowed to dry completely, gets its initial firing and then is dipped in clear glaze. (Its hole also is cleaned out, to ensure the suspension wires can be inserted easily.)
Before the second, and final, firing, the piece is finished with a transparent glaze — although a small area where the shape rests on the kiln is wiped clean to ensure it doesn’t become welded to the kiln shelf during the glazing process. The chandelier then is assembled with carefully positioned hoops to create the clustered effect of candles as well as decorative pieces in the shape of cymbals, skittles and pears around the central column.
The process takes four to five weeks from beginning to end, Ms. Wilson said. If clay isn’t totally dry before firing, the pieces will crack or explode in the kiln.
“I have my heart in my mouth whenever I open the kiln,” she said. “Sometimes the door opens and you’re met with a smashed horror, but I’ve learned there is freedom in accepting the alchemy of clay and fire.”
Inspired by Contrast
This spring Ms. Wilson and the three youngest of her five children moved to the county of Dorset on England’s southern coast, where they now live in an estate’s old lodge with her partner, Ben Short, and his son. “He thinks our lane is enchanted,” she said, referring to Mr. Short. “You can imagine all sort of spirits falling into step as you walk along.”
What Ms. Wilson called the “positively Rubenesque” green rolling hills of Dorset (especially in contrast to the “medieval austerity” of the flat fenlands) inspired her new ceramic lamp bases, decorated in botanical themes (£2,250).
Their wicker lamp shades are a collaboration with Atelier Vime, a studio headquartered in the southern French village of Vallabrègues. The family-owned company makes willow wicker furniture using willow from its farm in Brittany and a hand-braiding technique traditional to the Provençal region.
Ms. Wilson had long been Instagram friends with the atelier’s owners, Anthony Watson and Benoît Rauzy, because, she said, they both owned houses “that were about to die.” She had approached Mr. Watson about a collaboration in 2022, after they both contributed to a raffle in aid of Ukraine, and finally came up with the lamps.
“I love that wicker begins life as a plant — and clay is essentially a lump of mud,” she said.
In planning the decoration, Ms. Wilson studied illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages as well as the writings of early Renaissance herbalists in Italy and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, a 16th-century botanist in Siena, Italy. Inspired by their illustrations, she painted the lamp bases with stylized renderings of the native orchid, wild carrot, feverfew and other plants that surround her new studio.
Ms. Wilson said she wanted her floral motifs to have an elevated appearance, but added that she wants all of her creations to become objects of everyday life that straddle form and function, and “ultimately become members of the family.”
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