Full description

This handmade ceramic piece, glazed inside, can be used as a vase for garden flowers, ikebana arrangements, foliage, or just to make a lovely addition to your rooms. I’ve used black stoneware clay to make a tall, loosely rounded form, then decorated the clay surface with bands of colour in lemon, grey and ochre, before adding a nature-based design of grasses and seedheads against the background. The technique of using a sharp tool to engrave through the surface colour to expose the clay beneath, is known as sgraffito. The piece has two panels of decoration front and back. Inside, after the first firing, I have glazed, before firing again to give a shiny finish of russet and blue tones as you can see in one of the images. The outside I have left as the natural fired finish of the black clay itself, and the coloured clay slips, so this gives a matt finish. It is a long, slow, making process with two firings in order to get the effect I wanted. 17.5cms tall x 8 cms diameter at the widest part of the base, which carries my potter’s mark of a swallow in flight.