About the work

To accompany the exhibition Eduardo Paolozzi at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Grantchester Pottery have created a series of fruit bowls inspired by Hammer Prints Ltd; a design company founded in 1954 by Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson to create home furnishings including wallpaper, fabrics and ceramics.

Taking as a starting point Hammer’s use of ready-made pottery blanks as a surface to apply print, The Grantchester Pottery commissioned ceramicist Mizuyo Yamashita to create a series of thrown pots or ‘fruit bowls’ loosely interpreted from drawings supplied by the artists.

These thrown forms act as blank surfaces onto which The Grantchester Pottery scratched designs using the process of sgraffito – a traditional form of ceramic decoration.The scratched designs are composited from travel photographs of landscapes, interiors and the artists' studios, with recurring motifs such as eyes, flowers, bottles of gin, and lemons. They also reference designs by Hammer Prints, such as ‘Bark Cloth’ and ‘Sgraffito’.

In contrast to the traditional sgraffito process, each bowl is individually glazed using a varying palette of industrial glazes. The fruit bowls bear the pottery marks of both The Grantchester Pottery emblem, and in homage to Hammer Prints, a hammer symbol, which is unique to this edition.

About the artist

Established in 2011 and based in the UK, The Grantchester Pottery is a decorative arts company set up by artists Phil Root & Giles Round. Drawing historical precedent from Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops as well as other artists’ decorative arts studios like the Rebel Arts Centre, Hammer Prints & Atelier Martine, The Grantchester Pottery seeks to produce a series of utilitarian ceramics together with other decorative household items such as printed and woven textiles, wallpaper, painted furniture and hand painted murals.