item details
Overview
Looking back in blue and white
When I was growing up in Dunedin, my mother had a hankering for willow pattern … the sauce boats, the terrines - you name it, it was there. So I kind of grew up with it. It was always in my life.
Richard Stratton
Richard Stratton’s whimsical creation draws on the long history of blue-and-white ceramics, and his own memories and imagination.
Porcelain painted with a cobalt-blue underglaze first flourished in China in the 1300s. It later became the height of fashion in Europe. By the 1750s, the craze was well under way. ‘Scale’ decorations, derived from fish scales, became popular in Asia, then England. You can see them on Stratton’s sculpture, and on the dragon vase in this exhibition.
There are personal elements in Stratton’s creation too. The digger is a nod to the classic children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) – and to Stratton’s own passion for ‘digging up old ceramic practices’. And the clown that tops off the sculpture is him.