Bespoke commission
“I'm particularly interested in the tension between natural processes and the ways humans alter the landscape.”
Flora takes commissions based on a landscape of your choice. Send her a photograph and she will turn it into the pattern of a plate or platter.
Flora makes hand-built ceramic plates and platters from coloured clay. Her technique comes from nerikomi and neriage, Japanese methods where clays of different colours are layered to make the pattern, rather than painting it on afterwards. Over the years she has adapted them into a way of working that is her own.
Flora colours the clay by hand and builds up the design in a block, then cuts slabs from it and rolls, stretches and shapes them into plates. The way each slab is rolled decides how the colours come out, so no piece can be made twice. Plates from the same block are made as a small run, and are similar but never identical.
Her patterns are based on aerial photographs of the land: tidal channels, erosion, and the marks left by mining and industry. Seeing Edward Burtynsky's exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery had a big effect on her, and she also looks to the work of the photographer David Maisel.
Flora studied jewellery at art school and later taught art. After lockdown she turned to clay, spending two years on evening and part-time ceramics courses. She is largely self-taught, and spent several years experimenting before arriving at her own technique. She now works from a shared studio in a converted zip factory in Stoke Newington.
