Shihan Sun is an MA Illustration student at UCA. She chose to work with the Crafts Study Centre for her Collaborative Practice project, and has written the following blog to share her work.

At the start of this project I visited the Crafts Study Centre to see the ceramics. I am really interested in crafts and so I found the ceramic collection very appealing. Looking at the collection, I had a flash of inspiration in which I connected the ceramics with landscapes.  Rather than shaping the ceramics into new things, I decided to give them new meanings in the form of a short story about two brothers – the ceramics are still themselves, but in the characters’ eyes they are the world. 

The inspiration for the story came from the movie ‘Night at the Museum’, in which the exhibits in the museum come alive at night and have exciting adventures. But instead of the exhibits becoming the characters, I though about how to use the CSC’s exhibits as backdrops for the characters. When I looked at the ceramics, I found that some of them looked like very specific natural landscapes: deserts, lakes, starry skies, mountains, waves etc.

My favourite was the bowl by Emmanuel Cooper which looks like the sea – and this was one of my main sources of inspiration. The final selection of ceramics was based on what I liked and what visually appealed to me, but the content of my illustrations is based on the shapes, colours and textures of those ceramics. I made a few adjustments to the colours of the ceramics to make the illustrations look more harmonious, and overall I am very satisfied with the whole effect.

For my first scene, the bowl decorated by Bernard Leach (P.75.67) reminded me of the desert – it looks very old and has a pattern and texture like footprints.

For the second scene, I was inspired by two pieces. The sky is based on a little bowl by Denis Moore (P.74.206) which has beautiful purple and ultramarine colours, and the texture reminded me of a starry night. The deep lake is also a small bowl, from Bernard Leach’s source collection (P.79.2), but with a dark blue and brown interior.

The ceramic in the third scene is my favourite, the Emmanuel Cooper bowl. Its specific surface is so special, and I realised that it looks just like ‘a bowl of sea waves’. 

The ceramic from the final scene is a vase by Akiko Hirai on display in ‘The Common Ground’ exhibition at the CSC. I really liked this piece – it is very special because of its shape and texture, which look like rocks. It is also taller than the other pieces, which is why I made it into a mountain.

I am always interested in handcrafts, so ceramics appeal to me a lot – but I usually enjoy their beautiful textures and varied forms. The ceramics I chose are quite different from one another. The oldest was made in the 10th century – I have never touched an object which has such a long history, and I was amazed when the curator told me its age! As part of my research I read a lot about the potters represented in the Crafts Study Centre and the techniques they used, which was all new to me. And although I didn’t connect the history of the ceramics with my illustrations, I was still pleased to have learned about it.

I now know that every object has its own history and story, and that even if we don’t know the whole story it is still fun to imagine what happened to those objects. For me, this is why ceramics are so appealing.