Ffion Collinsworth

Light streams through the open windows of a cottage kitchen: a wooden table worn from countless family meals stands proud, and a row of cupboards lining the walls is filled with handmade ware. Every ceramic piece holds evidence of the maker’s touch. When my work leaves the studio, this is where I envision it living - if it were to travel far outside these bounds, it would still carry the ambiance of cottage ware. The idea of a cottage is a dream. I romanticize the idea of living in this space, with a family and a life integrated with the world beyond the kitchen window. While the work I make is a reflection of the relationship between my observed environment and domestic life, it is also a representation of where I see myself in my future.

I cultivate the surface of my pottery over time. Carefully illustrated imagery is drawn from life, collections, and photographs of birds, flowers, fruit, and insects. My compositions depict a central drawing, framed by patterns abstracted from nature. The forms I find myself driven to create are large display pieces. Plates and platters for serving generous cuisines, and flower frogs for enchanting floral displays. Wide surfaces are an open canvas for illustrations. Working with a scraffito on dark earthenware, I use colored slips, colored glazes, and majolica to build layers of pigments to enliven and compose motifs.

Growing up in the northeast, my ceramic work became influenced by gardens filled with blueberries, strawberries, tall carrot stems, flowers such as forget-me-nots, tansies, daisies, and thistle. Gardens attract beetles, grubs, snails, slugs, bees, and butterflies; and with the presence of insects, comes chickadees, gold finches, titmice, woodpeckers, and robins. When designing a display plate, often the central focus is a bird, a red-headed woodpecker for example, and when framing him there might appear a plethora of tiny blueberry sprigs and strawberry blossom patterns on the rim. My pottery creates a bridge from our homes to the great outdoors. Nature hasalways seeped into our kitchens, both literally and illustratively. It is the place that a harvest first touches down in the home, and many people can relate to or remember having plates and serving platters framed with floral patterns as ceramics found in the kitchen often depict themes of our natural surroundings. I hold sacred the connection that we have with the environment outside our kitchen windows, and use pottery and utility, as a celebration of that relationship.