These days, it’s likely that you know far more about the origins of
every item resting atop your dinner plate—from the fields where
the lamb once gamboled to the woods where the mushrooms were
foraged—than anything about the plate itself. Designers Lonny
van Ryswyck and Nadine Sterk addressed this locavore’s dilemma
head-on, with their investigation into the farmlands of the Noord-
oostpolder (Northeast Polder) in the central Netherlands. Gather-
ing samples of dirt from different regions, they created clay and
molded serving pieces—what they call Polderceramics—that look at
once distinctly modern and plucked from a 17th-century still life.
Says van Ryswyck, “W e wanted to make tableware so that the veg-
etables prepared for dinner could be served from vessels made
from the soil they came out of.” Thus, milk is poured from a pitcher
made from the ground where the cows grazed, and a bowl reunites
strawberries or potatoes with the soil that once sustained them.
More than a poetic conceit, the project—which has been exhibited
in London, New York and the Netherlands—illuminates the inti-
mate connections between past and present, farm and table.
For most of their creative lives, van Ryswyck and Sterk bought
their clay in a shop like almost everyone else, giving little thought
to its provenance. Van Ryswyck’s epiphany occurred as a student,
when she was in Peru volunteering at the artisans’ collective Allpa
(which happens to mean “earth” in indigenous Quecliua). “There,
artists don’t buy their clay, they dig it out of the ground, prepare it,
dance on it to remove the air bubbles. This is the first time I saw
where clay actually comes from—and it was life changing.”
On a subsequent trip to Brazil, the two designers observed
a self-sustaining Japanese community whose members make their
own pots and grow their own vegetables. They determined to re-
turn for their graduation project, until a prescient professor at the
Eindhoven Design Academy encouraged them to continue their
explorations on native ground.
“So we traveled around the country, collecting dirt, with no idea
what we’d find,” remembers van Ryswyck. “ It was like digging for
gold.” They identified 14 distinct geological regions and fashioned
a cup and saucer from each kind of clay. “And when we opened the
oven door, it was like a present!” Sterk recalls. “There were all
these different colors and textures, depending upon the minerals
in the soil.” There were buttery yellow pieces, such as those from
Brunssum, colored by the chalk that was washed to north Holland
when England and France were ripped apart during the ice age;
rust-colored cups and saucers fashioned from soil rich in iron oxide;
and assorted hues in between.
“When you eat off a plate, you forget that ceramic is made
of clay, and that clay is very specific to its location,” says Sterk.
“In each piece you can read its history and the geological events
that shaped it,” be it the smooth, shiny brown pottery from
Woerden, or the rougher terra-cotta from Gilze-Rijen. Just as>
“Summer was for going through the fields, collecting
samples, and learning the history. Winter was for working
indoors with the clay and shaping the project. It’s given
us a different perspective on time.” —Lonny van Ryswyck
Left: Tiles laid out in
the shape of the North-
east Polder reflect the
great diversity of the
soil within the region
and the differences in
mineral composition-
with colors ranging
from a pale bisque to
a deep oxblood brown.
Opposite:
Embellished with
traditional decorative
materials such as
pewter, pieces in the
Polderceramics collec-
tion were photo-
graphed to evoke the
mood of 17th-century
Dutch paintings.
048 american craft june/july io
www.WorldMags.net & www.Journal-Plaza.net
