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The story of these pots started with a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum, back in 2013. There I saw a vase from the Fulham Pottery, decorated with lustre fish and waves: the design pushed me forward on a journey of playing around with certain elements of its pattern. Traditional Hungarian shapes of folk pottery, the dynamic but softly waving silhouettes of the country’s landscape, the constantly moving and swirling blanket of the meadow grasses and flowers as the wind blows them – they all provided me with beautiful and rich visual inspiration as well. The continuous, meandering line drawn by one generous movement of the hand creates the spine of my designs on each of my pots. Following the patterns of waves and fishbones, I scratch small parallel curved lines into the surface, organising them into rows above each other, creating waving and flow, and a bit of optical illusion.
I work with two different colour palettes. One is characterized by a neutral palette of strong, warm autumnal colours (browns, tans, buffs, muted reds and oranges) which are present both in clay body and decoration colour, derived from different oxides of iron. The clay is sandy, speckled and with its surface left unglazed and rough, it resembles rocks and the soil. The other is very bright, very bold – white stoneware clay combined with saturated hues of blues, greens, turquoises, reds and oranges, glazed with a shiny transparent glaze. Here, the red-yellow shades are for drinking pots and dessert plates, and the darker blue-turquoise-green range appears on the dinner plates; the reason for this separation is the relationship of the pot and the food which will be served in it. The dark bluish hues work particularly well with main courses and the cheerful reds are great with desserts or brighten the mood up in gloomy mornings when hot coffee is served up in them.
The memories of my childhood summers, spent back in Hungary. Meadow flowers and grasses, softly moving and waving in the light summer breeze, their vivid greens already burnt to a warm yellow-brown by the sun. The scorching heat, that melted the tarmac on the roads and made the air tremble above them. The chirping of crickets, the buzzing of the insects, the ringing of the church bell from a distant village, the constant whisper of the feathering grasses.
Chess is a game of strict rules and strategy: everyone on the board is obedient and has limited choice of movement. On the other hand, I experience every day how children tend to disobey, and find their very own solutions. I admire their imagination, creativity and ability to look at things from a new and unconventional point of view. In my chess set – inspired by a set displayed in the Museum of Childhood - I tried to capture this freedom and the result is a colourful playground where the board moves out of its 2D limitations and resembles stones of different heights, and the figurines are children who play on and among them. My colour scheme is based on the displayed set, using black, white, red and blue, but for the children I chose brighter, more cheerful shades of blue and red. To achieve a stone-like effect, I used stoneware clay which fires to a warm, light brown colour and gives a neutral background. The pieces were all hand-made, I did not use moulds or machinery because I think the rounded, slightly chunky and imperfect shapes reflect the concept very well.