3. Splendid when empty, Katrin Moye’s water jugs would also look wonderful filled with summer flowers
Continuing our series on makers whose work we believe is worthy of being passed down to future generations, we meet Katrin Moye, a ceramicist inspired by domestic objects of the past
Aset of three albarello jars are the ! rst pieces of work ceramicist Katrin Moye shows me when we begin our Covid-safe video tour of her No"ingham studio. Each jar is hand-painted with the joyful swirling garlands and dots that make her work so recognisable.
Originally used by apothecaries to store medicines, albarello jars are one of Katrin’s current fascinations. Like their antique forebears, Katrin’s jars are made from earthenware, in an elegant convex shape. They stand on a pedestal foot with an inscription around the middle.
‘ When I work in my studio,
I always have Radio 4 on,’ Katrin explains, ‘and I made those last summer when it was 100 per cent Covid coverage on the news.’ Struck by the ‘very simpli !ed three-part catchphrases’ that punctuated her day (‘Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ or ‘ Hands. Face. Space’) and conscious of Boris Johnson’s love of a Latin phrase, Katrin turned to Google Translate. She then painted the Latin versions of the slogans onto her jars.
‘ These translate as: Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives,’ she says, adding that she also made a series of jugs. Her favourite reads
Firmamentum Bulla, which means ‘Support Bubble’ in Latin.
The shelves and surfaces of her studio are ! lled with work, for numerous projects, all in various stages of completion. Her main focus at the moment is a large order of historically inspired posy bowls and tulipieres for The Shop Floor Project, her long-term collaborator and the main gallery that sells her work. She takes inspiration from many sources she says – intriguing things she’s heard on the radio or seen in a gallery or read about in a book. Once something has captured her imagination, she feels compelled to create a body of work based on her ‘current hobby horse’, she says.
Katrin’s ! rst experiments with po"ery were on an art foundation course a #er her A levels, where she discovered a passion for throwing on the wheel. She wasn’t interested in doing a ! ne art degree, she says, as painting wasn’t her thing and she was unaware that a degree in ceramics was an option. So she opted to follow another passion – her love
of literature, and she took a joint honours in English and art history at No!ingham University. Po!ery took a back seat while she worked in Waterstones and had her family, but she returned to it via a part-time BTEC while her children were small. It was clear from the start that she’d found what she wanted to do.
From 2004, she established a successful small business making batch productions of her own designs inspired by the do!y, "oral, folky pa!erns of Polish Boles¯awiec tableware, which she’d always loved. She sold her work through galleries and the cra $ fair circuit, but found running the business exhausting and unful % lling creatively. In 2017, she decided she needed some time out and embarked on a residency at No!ingham’s Lakeside Arts, where she worked on a project with Chinese students making po!ery objects based on their descriptions of things they missed from home.
She found the experience freeing and fascinating, especially the process of trying to imagine what the objects being described looked like, when the describers didn’t speak much English. She became intrigued with the idea of creating objects from interpreted descriptions. When Lakeside Arts asked her to make
some pieces for the museum shop to go alongside an exhibition of paintings by Winifred Nicholson, she found an opportunity to explore the idea further. This time she recreated in po!ery some of the domestic objects depicted in the paintings. Adding more items from works by Vanessa Bell and Mary Fedden, she created her % rst full collection for The Shop Floor Project.
Her next collection, a set of tableware inspired by a %ctional family kitchen, grew out of a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse along with several visits to Woolf’s home in Rodmell, East Sussex. ‘ There’s a central set piece in the novel where the family is si!ing down to dinner and the dining table and the candlelight and the objects and the food are really beautifully described,’ Katrin explains. ‘So I made a collection of work that would have been on that dining table at that dinner. That was really the thing that started me o& on the track I’m on now. Everything else has followed from there.’
Subsequent projects have included sculptures based on the double entendres in the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, which in turn led to her interest in the 18th- century book Primitive Physic by John Wesley, which o&ers an insight into common ailments and cures of the time. This has sparked a collection based on medical ceramics, including drugs jars, which will be coming out in the autumn. It was from this that Katrin got inspiration for her albarello jars.
‘The theme comes and then I % nd a way to make that out of ceramic,’ says Katrin. ‘ I do have an instinct for % nding a historical precedent and I’m really a!racted to the 18thcentury style and vernacular, so that’s where I instinctively go. At the moment I’m really interested in how people displayed "owers historically and the tulip craze in Amsterdam that spilled over into this country.’ To explore this, in early 2020, just before lockdown hit, she visited The Netherlands to immerse herself in Dutch Del $ware. An exhibition of The Lavino Collection at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague was a highlight, and she credits the trip with having had a major in "uence on the work she has made since.
For Samantha Allan, co-founder of The Shop Floor Project, it’s the extent to which Katrin delves into her subjects that not only makes her work unique, but is also the reason for its huge popularity with her customers. ‘ Katrin’s work is very thoughtful. It o$en takes you to another time or place through her research into themes such as female painters of the early 20th century, or the 18th- century Huguenot silk weavers of Spital %elds. I would say the delight of her collections comes from the decoration and shapes, but also because they are researchbased and tell stories – something that chimes with what we do at The Shop Floor Project.’