A handmade white clay plate with grey slip and vine leaf impression, as well as impressions of Stephen Spender’s broken Wedgwood Portland Vase. Finished with a clear glaze.
Saskia Spender, the granddaughter of the renowned Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky, grew up within a family of artists in the Tuscan countryside near Siena. She was drawn to clay, which her father worked from the 1980s, and in 2005 the ceramicist Betty Woodman introduced her to leaf printed tiles. Her studio is in London, where she has lived and worked since 1987. Her handmade ceramics are collected and exhibited internationally. “I used to be fascinated by the sight of clay rising like a genie between the potter’s hands, growing and shifting in an unmistakably phallic way, and then evolve into a feminine form: a cup, a vase, a bowl. A vessel.”