Sharing Food Grounding Dreams
It’s my firm belief that the second most important aspect of designing table ware is the way it feels in your hand. You remember a lot through your fingertips, everyone has a favourite cup or mug, a bowl they gravitate to for pasta. It’s weight and way it fits in your hand are just as important as the colour. I’m looking to design a dining set that can move from the BBQ to the breakfast table. I want to centre this collection around one large sharing dish that can be presented from hot coals directly to the table. I also wish to design a stand for the main piece to sit on. Smaller plates can be stacked, rim to rim and shared around the hot plate, and then stored away as a large- ish sculptural feature. Additionally, cups in a similar style can be stacked upside down on top of each other to created a smaller structure.
For this project, my hope is to incorporate London clay that I have foraged from the water works on my street into the claybodies. Thereby offsetting some of the factory footprint this project could have by replacing some clay with foraged stuff from construction.
My first step is to make a claybody that can survive the thermal shock of going from extreme heat to room temperature and a glaze to match to it. Step two is to design the nestling shapes for the sharing bowls. Step four is finding a matching claybody to execute the bowls. Step five is cups.
My original thought was to elevate the the cookout by coopting design elements from reto-futurist ideas and letting the ceramic do the work of grounding the pieces back into community and place. However, upon reflection, I may be stealing ideas from closer to home, using the rounded edges of American tin camping cutlery to create nestling spaces along the rims of the pieces, which echoes designs from Queensbury Hunt and Hornsea Pottery in the 70’s.
