Floral Wonders in the Circle of Life Collection
Thousands of visitors come to the Moorcroft Heritage Visitor Centre in Burslem and enjoy a tour each year, seeing at first hand the diverse skills that are needed to create a piece of Moorcroft.
This month we have three fabulous creations from Moorcroft for you to win...
The first pieces of Moorcroft were designed in 1897 and since then Moorcroft’s manufacturing process has barely changed. The only exception is that today an electrical kiln is used, rather than the original 1913 bottle oven that looms above the factory.
Rows of sweet-perfumed, purple lavender fields sway below a dark green back cloth of columnar cypress trees.
Provence, from our Senior Designer, Rachel Bishop, brings to The Circles of Life Collection a subtle mix of lavender pink, purple and green - all three colours at the more challenging end of the Moorcroft colour spectrum.
The design itself is gloriously evocative of the region, with its rich colours, simple line-work and a magical use of green shaded with burgundy. Taken together, it is predicted that Provence will one day be seen as one of the great Moorcroft designs of all time. Rachel Bishop has done it before and this time round, she has done it again.
Moorcroft designer, Nicola Slaney, took the world by storm with her a Jerusalem vase which sold out within months notwithstanding its £11,000 price tag.
Today, blazing red poppies rise in effortless movement out of the darkness, twisting around the vase with magnificence.
A Family Through Flowers
Emma Bossons FRSA 's design gift to Hugh and Maureen Edwards which follows their fractured family into four counties in England and unites them in this limited edition floral tribute.
Poppies (flower of Essex), Cuckoo flower (flower of Cheshire), Maltese Cross (floral emlem of Bristol) and heather for the Staffordshire Moorlands. The flowers twist and dance in an effortless flow of movement and colour.
Emma has never been orthodox in her design work, but on this occasion she has surpassed herself.
Small wonder that the Lord Mayor of London Elect commissioned Emma to design the cover for the Lord Mayor's Show programme for 2011 in London, his banquet menu card and a Christmas card for Heads of State, Ambassadors and Captains of Industry worldwide.
Emma has also just returned from a successful tour of New Zealand
Allegro Flame A predecessor of this piece sits on the Edwards family table, admired by many.
Reintroduced on a Moorcroft shape rediscovered in Oglethorpe, Georgia, in the United States in 2001 this vase is tipped to be a favourite amongst the thousands of Moorcroft Collector's within the Moorcroft Collectors' club.
Vicky Lovatt has an affinity with space. The universe might well be her local park and the planets objects of beauty strategically placed around that park with their own colours and forms.
What Moorcroft collectors do not know is that on the 1st September this year (2011), Vicky was elected to enter the coveted Moorcroft Design Studio.
Moorcroft will then have a Design Studio of five designers to propel the company into the future.
For Vicky, circles of life are to be found in the universe, among the stars and planets.
Beetle Box
A century ago, a technique used in the early days by William Moorcroft was that of the blue-on blue engobe patterns.
Examples regularly surface in the auction rooms, but by the time Moorcroft reached its centenary in 1997, the engobe technique had also been rediscovered.
When she designed Beetle Box, Kerry Goodwin demonstrated once again that Moorcroft could create art with just one colour, cobalt blue.
The various shades of blue allow cleverly contrived design patterns to crawl out of the clay.
At the time of its introduction in 1987, Honeycomb by artist/designer, Phillip Richardson, was seen as novel, but its subsequent success in the secondary market was not a thought which entered anyone's mind.
Happy indeed are those collectors with a Honeycomb ginger jar who will be probably looking at a five-fold increase on their original investment.
Phillip has been a bee-keeper for more than thirty years, and it is perhaps not altogether surprising that he opted to revisit the subject of bees on the smallest piece in The Circles of Life Collection.
Bumblebee is one of two pieces in Phillip's Dance in Clover section.
Simplicity and clarity are two great qualities sought by designers in a fine piece of Moorcroft, and the little clover coaster has great charm for that reason alone.
Through the vision of the Moorcroft Design Studio and with added value coming from the experience, skills and craftsmanship of a dedicated Stoke-on-Trent workforce, Moorcroft is selling more of its magnificent ware today than ever before.
With a strong belief in its own destiny, Moorcroft has an ever-increasing reputation for being a design lead company, renowned worldwide for its quality and innovation.
To mark Hugh and Maureen Edwards 25 years at the helm of Moorcroft Art Pottery, all pieces all pieces in the Circle of Life Collection will be embossed with the celebratory back stamp.
Moorcroft - Creating Floral Design since 1897
www.moorcroft.com
