Rhiannon Batten
wrote ‘Shelf Life’
Rhiannon is a freelance writer, with a degree in archaeology and anthropology, and a focus on travel, design and food. She lives in Somerset.
‘The big project this year is filling an organically shaped gap in the patio with upturned, reclaimed clay tiles. I’m hoping it will look like an understated underfoot sculpture with erigeron and thyme growing between the cracks, and I can’t wait to sit out there in the summer.’
When life was literally stilled during the pandemic, long hours spent at home made us look at the spaces and objects around us with new focus. Many of us arranged and rearranged our mantelpieces, kitchen shelves and desks, adorning them with gatherings of objects that brought us comfort – trinkets from foreign travels, gi !s from cherished friends, treasures inherited from relations and mementoes from parties past. Some shared photographs of these pleasingly curated arrangements on Instagram, where they are known as ‘shel "es’. But for a small group of British artists it was business as usual: they had long been painting and drawing carefully assembled vigne#es of objets trouvés and decorative antiques, their work united by a shared appreciation of vintage pieces.
‘ It’s about capturing memories,’ says ceramics collector and artist SJ Axelby, who is known for creating colourful, "nely drawn mixed media work inspired by her own collections as well as beautiful interiors she admires. ‘I always bring something back from my travels and my shelves become time capsules,’ she says, likening them to Victorian cabinets of curiosity. ‘ The shel "e is a modern way of doing that; it’s a mini museum of special objects – things that have sentimental if not great monetary value.’
This sentiment is shared by artist Unity Coombes, whose playful shelf portraits o!en feature painted Chinese porcelain, Japanese tea bowls and plates inspired by the Eastern Art collections she cares for in her other role working at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. ‘Objects that have existed for a long time have an extra quality about them,’ she says. ‘It’s not about "nding very expensive or rare pieces. It’s that other people have handled them, they come with
histories. For this moment they’re in my hands, but I hope one day my son will handle them and many a !er him. When I come across something in a charity shop that’s 200 years old there’s always that ‘wow!’ moment, knowing it has survived all that time. It’s like "nding treasure.’
Inspired by 20th- century female British artists working in the still life tradition, Unity’s colourful works are known for their "ne detail. ‘I’m drawn to pa#ern and surface decoration, particularly of animals, birds and "gures. Even when I paint animals they tend to be inspired by ceramics, by Sta $ordshire or Meissen pieces. I like the naivety of them, and the characterful decoration.’
Another artist noted for her detailed depictions of antique ceramics – o!en a hand-painted cup "lled with a posy of seasonal %owers – is Yorkshire-based Debbie George. ‘ I’ve just sourced the smallest brush I can, a ‘000’, so things are about to get even more detailed,’ she quips when we speak. Growing up with an artist mother and a grandmother whose house had ‘po#ery, antiques and paintings everywhere’, she knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of eight. ‘ There was always a pot, always %owers,’ she says. ‘ I love the shape of a %ower or the pa#ern of a cup and want to put them together. Granny always had huge vases of %owers and Mum was a gardener, so there were always fresh %owers in the house. I loved going home and "nding a li#le posy of %owers by the bed. Now they’ve both passed away the memories and emotions a#ached to those things are even stronger.’
As Debbie’s followers know, she is an avid collector of ceramics, with a special interest in antique children’s ware that was prompted by the purchase of a tiny cup from Richard Sco# Antiques in Holt two decades ago. Painted with the mo#o ‘Present for a Good Girl’ it was the start of an ever-growing collection. ‘ It’s amazing what they put on nursery ware – poems, educational motifs and so on – but the naivety, the detail and the small scale also appeal to me.’
‘It’s not about nding very expensive or rare pieces. It’s that other people have handled them,’ says Unity
Like Debbie, printmaker and painter Angie Lewin’s fascination with ceramics began with a cup. ‘ When I was about four years old I visited an elderly relative who had a collection of ceramics and she gave me a small Spode co!ee cup,’ she remembers. ‘It was hand-painted with a shepherd, and a li"le #ock of sheep. I was fascinated by it.’ That appreciation of decoration remains with Angie today. ‘If I see a co!ee cup or vase, I’m drawn almost more to the design than the form,’ she says, ‘though with antiques I also like the history. I get very absorbed in the stylisation. The pieces I own o$en have botanical imagery on them, stylised by an artist in whichever era they were working. I like to think about how they chose to do it – I’m intrigued by their thought pa"erns.’
Angie’s characteristic nature table depictions pair antique ceramics with hedgerow and seashore % nds foraged from the hills around her Speyside home, the nearby Moray coast or the landscapes she walks while visiting St Jude’s Prints, the Norfolk-based printmakers’ gallery she set up with her husband Simon in 2005. Her work tends to start with something she’s been sketching that day – fritillaries from her garden, or a Sta !ordshire %gure of a kilted Highlander. Then she scans her studio to % nd other items. A li"le lustre mug might catch her eye, or a feather, and pieces develop as she puts things together on the mantelpiece. ‘ Evolving jumble is probably a good way of pu"ing it,’ she jokes, though the end result is anything but jumbled – precise, detailed work that re#ects her deep horticultural knowledge.
If Angie is inspired by the natural world, Bristol-based artist Joanna
Wright jokes that ‘pots and pears seem to be what I do.’ A longestablished exponent of the shelfbased still life, her paintings, prints and textile work o!en include pieces from her collection of antique and vintage ceramics, and it’s the everyday nature of these objects that appeals to her. ‘ They’re the sort of things people might relate to,’ she says. ‘ There’s nothing exotic or fantastical about them. You can get endless permutations with an apple and a pear and a cup, and you’ve always got those objects to hand.’
Crediting her mother with sparking her interest in collecting – ‘we were always whizzing o" to junk shops and jumble sales growing up and I’ve inherited that gene’ – she now has a diverse collection of antique cups. Most are early 19thcentury English teaware but she also owns some treasured pieces handpainted by her mother-in-law, Star Wedgwood (a designer- decorator for Wedgwood in the 1930s) and some mid- century pieces.
One of Joanna’s favourites is a three-handled 1940s jug with a wiggly leaf pa#ern and, crucially, a bright orange stripe at the bo#om. ‘ I’m glad to see colour is coming back,’ she says. ‘It cheers us up. We need orange and turquoise in our lives.’
Brighton-based illustrator and designer Emily Maude would surely agree. Her work is diverse and constantly evolving but she has won a recent following for her imagined tableaus based on what she calls her ‘dresser of dreams’ – collectable ceramic pieces set against antique fabrics and wallpapers. Vividly painted – sometimes on paper, sometimes using a reverse glass technique – her shel $e-style
‘I was a racted to mantelpieces because they’re the stage sets of people’s lives,’ says Lo ie Cole
montages o!en include Sta "ordshire dogs and pink lustreware.
Colour has been a relatively new development for Emily. ‘I guess those jewel-like shades come from wanting to # nd joy in a bleak time,’ she says. But Sta "ordshire dogs have long been a source of inspiration. ‘ They’re part of the country’s folk art heritage. Like lustreware, they were made to be a "ordable but, although they were mass-produced, each piece is slightly di "erent and has its own character because it was hand-painted. It intrigues me, when I pick one up, to think: “Who would have decorated this?”’
For painter Lo$ie Cole it’s the % ip question that inspires her. Not ‘ Who painted this?’ but ‘ Who might have owned this?’ She approaches her interiors-based paintings by thinking about the imaginary person who might inhabit the room she is creating. She then lets herself go on an imaginary shopping spree, she explains. ‘I don’t own very much of what I paint. Painting my own house doesn’t excite me. It’s the thrill of the chase, the conjuring up, the thinking: “That parrot would be hard to dust!”’
The parrot in question appears in one of a series of mantelpiece paintings Sussex-based Lo$ie has recently been working on. ‘ I didn’t want to do straight still lifes but I was a$racted to mantelpieces because they’re the stage sets of people’s lives,’ she says. ‘ I listened to a radio documentary discussing mantelpieces as shrines to people’s aspirations, how they hold the things we love, the invitations to events. They’re a re%ection of how we’d like to be seen, perhaps, rather than how we really are.’
Her paintings, which o!en incorporate antiques, are similarly an a$empt to describe the idea of home. ‘ Women are so good at making a home,’ she says. ‘O!en you’ll have a beautiful room, but it’s not perfect. There’s that hideous heirloom you’ve kept because you love it. That interests me. I like to imagine the story behind each item I paint. I have a pair of ceramic pheasants on my mantelpiece that I found in a junk shop. They really shouldn’t go in that room but they mean something to me and I love them, and somehow they work.’ She # nds immaculate interiors hotellike and too perfect. ‘ If you look at my paintings you’ll see that small tables may be squished up too close to a sofa, or a chair may be blocking something else. But that’s how we live,’ she says.
Perhaps it’s this imperfection that explains why the painted shel #e is having a moment. It appeals precisely because it’s approachable and adaptable, not # xed and %awless. Look closely and you’ll see the china might be slightly chipped, the %owers aren’t always perfectly arranged. In a world that has felt very serious in recent times, it’s a reminder that time passes, that change can be something to relish and that there is always joy to be found, not least in the objects we surround ourselves with. Or, as SJ Axelby puts it: ‘ We don’t have ‘nice’ china in our house because it’s all nice. We use willow pa$ern every day. It looks great under Marmite on toast!’