Printed landscape patterned plates decorating the tomb of Kien Thai Vuong outside Hue in Vietnam, (illustration from Vietnamese Ceramics a Separate Tradition, Stevenson Guy and Cort 1997)

Printed landscape patterned plates decorating the tomb of Kien Thai Vuong outside Hue in Vietnam, (illustration from Vietnamese Ceramics a Separate Tradition, Stevenson Guy and Cort 1997)

On my first day here I was taken by a couple of small vases in the Fine Arts Museum, they were decorated with cloud motifs. Over the years I’ve appropriated and re-worked various cloud details from mainly Copeland/Spode tableware patterns to create smoke for the chimneys on my plates. I was reminded of the re-working in Bergen a few weeks ago when I saw Caroline Slotte’s beautiful Under Blue Skies series, and resolved to create a cloud pattern for the Mosaic wall... below cloud vases from Bat Trang (nineteenth century), my decorative unit adapted from an old Spode pattern, plus wall mock-up

The Wild Rose pattern is based upon an engraving of a view of Nuneham Courtenay - a landscaped parkland designed by Capability Brown. It is the perfect exemplar of a confected English design, and was produced by over thirty different factories from Scotland, through Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, and Devon in the early nineteenth century. The same pattern was later appropriated and re-worked into a Southern Swedish landscape pattern - Mälmo by Rörstrand. I was tempted to use a version of the Wild Rose as my floral piece, but we chose the Prunus/Calico because of its more obvious thematic and timely connections.

Mock up of  enlarged Wild Rose border pattern as Red River Dike mosaic

Two ‘Cloud’ vases - 19th century made locally at Bat Trang village

Clouds - below basic unit, top wall mosaic mock-up (of course if Prunus/Calico is on this stretch of wall Clouds will be installed elsewhere)