Made in the closing months of 2016 ‘The Loves of Plants’ Ceramic Ginger Jar was privately commissioned for a home in Edinburgh. The species of plants and flowers have a vague generic link to wild flowers and come together on this piece more in atmosphere than accurate representation.
The title comes from The Botanic Garden 1761 a set of two poems by Erasmus Darwin, the second poem The Loves of Plants promotes, revises and illustrates Linnaeus’s classification scheme for plants. I have attempted to make a jar which celebrates the feeling of the wildness of ordinary country plants.
I do not make many botanical pieces now. My daughter J R Shepherd is a Botanist and a botanical painter of some note and she now takes the lead in this subject.
More views of this piece can be seen here in my blog post.
The pot is hand coiled from Staffordshire earthenware clay, painted with slips, outlined with scraffito techniques and glazed with a transparent high gloss glaze to 1120°C oxidation firing.