Read from across a room, Safari Totem looks like a wall of heraldic crests: paired figures facing one another, symmetrical, formally arranged around a central axis. Approach it and the family turns out to be animal, leopards, giraffes and elephants echoing each other's forms around a central palm, drawn from the totemic stacked sculptures the Ardmore studio makes.
The joke is good and the drawing is better. Each animal is decorated as an Ardmore vessel would be, in bands and scallops and small repeating marks, so the surface is patterned at two scales at once: the heraldic structure at a distance, the ornament close to. The composition climbs, its curves arching and entwining as they rise. Ardmore's ceramic work has always relied on this doubling, where a figure is also a surface for further decoration.
Colour is more restrained than the subject suggests, worked in ginger, ruby and taupe over grounds ranging from pale to near-black, which keeps the design sophisticated rather than exuberant. It wants a full wall to be read, since the vertical climb is the point, so a stair, a dining room or a study lined to the ceiling suits it better than a single panel between openings. It takes plain heavy curtains and a dark floor without difficulty.
