I have been making soap dishes for Bruny Island’s Soaps beautiful handmade soaps for a while now. They are a sustainable way to explore textures, try new techniques, and experiment with new glazes on a very useful everyday item in homes. For many of the textures I first make bisque fired embossing plates out of native plants and plants loved by the early colonists. Some of these plants are iconic species, native to Tasmania, and some are classic garden exotics, popular in the gardens here, and some have become terrible weeds. Each plant I use has meaning – I am deliberate in my selections. Japanese wisteria and gingko, favourites of colonial gardens contrast with natives such as kangaroo foot fern, saw-toothed banksia, and the delicately concertinaed fagus, so loved for its autumn colours. These impressions are like archives of nature’s ephemera.
The impressions and patterns the floral embossing plates and other texturing tools make the glazes I have developed break and flow dynamically, and add interest to these surfaces. Underglazes are degraded, split into their component pigments by the fluxes in the glazes I use, and these flow and crystallise in fascinating and unpredictable ways.
