Category Archives: Miniatures

Gift bowls

Gift bowls for W.G.H. Old Girls

These are bowls I gave to fellow Old Girls during a Wynberg Girls’ High School reunion while I was in Cape Town in early 2020. These were among the pieces I made during the mornings I spent at Lesley Porter’s pottery workshop near Muizemberg.

While visiting potters’ workshops and exhibitions in Cape Town, I had been impressed with the use of local underglazes, and wanted to try them myself. Here I used paintbrushes in applying them to the bisqued surfaces, rather than slip trailers as I usually do when applying glazes.

I wanted each bowl to be distinct, but for them all to form a set, so that each WGH old girl at the reunion would have one which would be paired with the others, and decorated with the same motif. Here each bowl is seen as an individual leaf sprouting from branches of one massive, long-standing tree.

Stoneware, fired in oxidation, to cone 5.

Six Miniature plates

Recently I have been using classic, hand-thrown pieces as a canvas for abstract patterns, in sets. Each piece, sufficient in itself, should contribute to a pleasing view of the whole. Each plate is small, functional, that nestles lightly in the hand. I make them to be used in everyday life: on a dining room table for condiments, or on a dresser, to hold something special. For me, the magic comes in the glazing; it’s the glazes that create something unexpected, evocative, and that catch the eye.

The initial glaze I applied by dipping the entire piece, except the foot. By the next day, with that layer dry, I applied the design by squirting a variety of thicknesses of the second orange-red glaze, which, after firing, seems to ripple over the iron-rich black glaze underneath. The very fine lines of white, shifting and moving in the melt, evoke for me white breakers at night, falling on a dark, heaving sea.

Dia: 8 cm

Porcelaneous stoneware (Frost), overlaid glazes; fired in oxidation to Cone 6