Nene is, in effect, a portrait of a vase. The design descends from a single celebrated Ardmore piece painted by one of the studio's founding hands, and much of what makes it unusual is that it was never conceived flat. The composition was worked around a curved surface, and something of that curvature survives in the way the motifs turn and crowd together.
A crowned crane presides, its face marked in a way that reads almost as a mask, and beside it swim fish that have been given bills. The surrealism is not laboured; it comes from the ceramic tradition itself, where the painter's task was to fill a shape rather than to describe a scene. Every leaf, feather and fin carries its own small pattern, so the design works at two scales at once: a bold silhouette from across the room, and a dense embroidery of marks close to.
This is a design for a wall you are prepared to look at properly. It will hold a dining room, a hallway with height, a garden room. It sits well with rattan, unpolished wood and plain heavy cotton, and it wants good natural light, without which the fineness of the painted detail is lost.
