Earth at Work

Very pleased to see that the new Anthropologie store – it’s an American chain, it’s ok not to say shop, I think – on Regent Street is almost complete. I can’t wait for it to open, especially since one of my favourite ceramicists, Mick Haigh, has been working like mad since March to complete an order for it.

Mick lives with his wife, Sally, and young son in a hamlet surrounded by exquisite hills  tattooed with forest and farmland in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa.  He works from a tiny wattle-and-daub studio that he built at the bottom of the garden with his son and, if you look carefully, you can see their handprints on the mud walls of the building.

It’s  about as close to stardom as anyone in the valley wants to get: property rarely comes up for sale and,  if you didn’t know where you were going, you could miss the turn-off to the cluster of houses and paddocks and carry on driving for forty or fifty kilometres, before reaching a dead-end at the foot of the Drakensberg mountains without seeing anyone except, perhaps, a Zulu herdsman on horseback.

Yet over the past few years Mick’s ceramics have beaten a path from that tiny studio to the local post office and to the world beyond: Cape Town, Johannesburg, New York, Paris, Eindhoven, Stavanger, and now Regent Street.

In the small cafe Sally runs in the nearest village there is, propped up against some of  some of Mick’s pieces, a note from Terence Conran inviting him to dinner, although Mick, I expect, would be happiest left to make pots in the valley.

“I work with mud: pale mud, dark mud, any kind of mud.  I’ve never planned anything – it’s just kind of happened for me,” he told me  in an interview I wrote for House and Garden magazine earlier this year.  I  think it’s an example of globalisation at its best.

Beautiful wallpaper from Camilla Meijer, a super designer whom I met at 100% Design last week.  Camilla aims to bring the outdoors inside, which, in case you were wondering, is not about wearing muddy boots on a thick pile carpet but is rather interiors-speak for introducing natural elements to decorating schemes.

Semantics aside, I love the fact that she draws inspiration from walks through London’s parks and gardens before drawing up her designs by hand.

I am astounded by the way plants and flowers find a way to flourish in such an enormous urban setting like London. London is a wonderfully green city thanks to the parks and other green spaces, but people’s gardens and other unexpected places produce yet more beautiful examples of flora. Everywhere I look I seem to find inspiration. I capture these images I see around me and use them to create my work.

Amusing piece by Sarah Vine in The Times yesterday about the resurgence of jam-making in Britain:

My mother, who came of age in the late Sixties, would far rather spend September soaking up the last of the summer’s rays with a gin and tonic than slaving over a hot pot, skimming off froth and washing endless sticky muslins.

For her generation, jam-making was an activity that only bored housewives on Valium and the fiercer members of the Women’s Institute indulged in. It was laborious, exhausting, just another redundant domestic activity that she was only too glad to be shot of.

How curious then, that in this fully liberated age, home-made jams appear to be enjoying a resurgence…

There’s a fine line between old-fashioned and retro-chic, and jam-making appears to have crossed it.

The full article includes recipes, from the WI Book of Preserves, that use  blackberries, crab apples, damsons and rose hips. Remember, however, that you read about blackberrying and jam-making on this blog first.  (Sometimes I am so on trend I stun even myself.)