FAIRYLAND, NOT OF THIS WORLD By Catherine Gage

Ruskin Pottery was founded by William Howson Taylor in 1898 at Smethwick in the West Midlands and the pottery became famous for its remarkable glaze-effects. Without doubt, it was Howson Taylor’s high-fired flambé ware which sort to rediscover the work of early Chinese potters of the Ming and Sung Dynasties which are considered exceptional among auction houses. The flambé pieces were fired at extremely high temperatures (between 1400 & 1600 degrees centigrade) to produce the unique colouring and glaze. The colours, ranging through spotted reds, crimsons, lavenders and purples, held such depth that momentary glances at these pieces of art pottery would not do them the justice they deserved. The secret formulae and techniques were destroyed by Howson-Taylor when he ceased to work in 1935.

Howson-Taylor was not the only English potter to harness the wonders of flambé. Within the Moorcroft Museum there is a fine example of a Claremont flambé twin-handled vase, featuring mushrooms under glaze. William Moorcroft started producing rouge flambé glazes in 1922. Our founding father created pure glaze effects in flambé but also as an overlay on his original Moorcroft pieces that had first been decorated with his designs. In doing so, William created something highly unique – it was as if his landscapes or famous Claremont mushrooms now came from a secret planet – the fires of Venus had been unearthed.

During the next two decades, William became an expert in the flambé process. By its nature, each piece was utterly unique, exploiting the full range of sang-de-boeuf (reds), yellows, orange and brown. William controlled the kiln himself, carefully nursing it through the vital transmutation process unaided. The Moorcroft flambé bottle oven was demolished in 1971.

With due regard to the harmful by-products of creating flambé, Chairman, Hugh Edwards, was determined to see if Moorcroft’s finest artist could recreate the flambé overglaze to take existing designs onto another trajectory. The gauntlet was laid down and picked up by two artists alone – Wendy Mason and Julie Dolan. With each painter holding over three decades of experience in Moorcroft decorating techniques, they were able, through artistry alone, to recreate the effect of William’s famous flambé overglaze. Some of the first pieces they created utilised poppy designs of various styles to extenuate the range of sang-de-boeuf or ox-blood reds found in poppy petals themselves.

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One of the masterpieces that Julie Dolan created, to the delight of Moorcroft’s Chairman and his wife, Maureen, held the windmill and famous cornfields peppered with poppies, of Thaxted, their hometown, and the place of many Moorcroft events, under a flambé glaze. The evocative references to the remembrance poppy and the fields of the Ypres, where Maureen’s own Grandfather is buried, could not be understated.

Moorcroft designer Emma Bossons FRSA featured in her Fairyland, a design series on a number of shapes, bright red toadstools, euphorbia and clusters of stylized birds on a cobalt background. It was recognised as an outstanding design by the Moorcroft Design Committee, but nothing prepared anyone for what was to come. To the concern of Moorcroft’s new Works Manager, Tracy Taylor, not connected by blood to the famous Howson-Taylor, this design, standing only 10 inches high, took days to recreate in the Moorcroft flambé idiom.

Emma had explained when she had created the design that the birds were from an Art and Crafts fabric she was studying at the time with all of the elements in the Fairyland design, a chromatic cacophony of fantastical motifs - toadstools, birds and flowers, all flooded with rich colours, melting into one another. For many, recreating this complex colour definition, and then, possibly, sabotaging its vibrant and complex colours hues, was a risk too high.

Nevertheless, Julie continued to flood Fairyland 7/10 with her secret palette of colours. When I received the first images, I was utterly blown away – never had Moorcroft achieved red toadstools in such vibrant hues. In short, it was as if the cluster had come from another dimension; unworldly. As I began to create a musical overtone for a Facebook reel, I placed my finger on the voiceover button and began to talk. Unable to explain in words the colours I had taken into my spirit, where the greens were greener than anything I had experienced in my life to date, I sat in silence. My description, somewhat inadequate, was later crafted as a message attached to the post. Sometimes art does that to you. It leaves you in silent contemplation – in a place where your words are inadequate to convey the truth. Flambé Fairyland, Moorcroft’s finest hour.