Slab-Built Stoneware Wall Pocket, Oval, Copper-Green Glaze Breaking Rust over Incised and Rouletted Decoration, c. 1970–1995

The Piece

An oval stoneware plaque built to hang on a wall, with a deep half-pocket applied across the lower front to hold what you put in it.

It is slab-built, not thrown — a flat sheet of clay cut to shape, with the pocket formed separately and joined on, and the join left visible as a soft ridge rather than smoothed away.

The decoration is cut into the clay: incised vertical lines running down the face, and a band of rouletted toothing pressed round the edge of the pocket with a toothed wheel.

The glaze is a copper green, mottled and uneven, pooling dark in the incised lines and breaking to rust-brown over every raised edge, so the form is outlined in its own glaze.

A hanging hole is pierced through the top. The reverse is unglazed — raw toasted stoneware, with the marks where the piece stood in the kiln.

History & Provenance

A wall pocket is a solution to a problem people stopped having, which is why they are worth having again. The form is old — a half-vessel hung flat against a wall, for flowers in a room with no table to spare, for matches beside a stove, for letters beside a door. It puts something at eye level in a house where every horizontal surface is already taken.

The green-breaking-rust is copper and iron doing what they do. A copper glaze gives green where it lies thick; where it runs thin over a sharp edge, the iron underneath burns through brown. That is why every raised line on this piece is outlined in rust and every cut line is pooled dark — the glaze is reading the form for you. The effect cannot be painted on. It only happens where there is real relief for the glaze to run off.

The rouletted border is a tool mark, and a specific one. A roulette is a small toothed wheel rolled across soft clay, and it leaves a band of even impressions that a stamp cannot match and a hand certainly cannot. It is one of the oldest decorating tools there is and it stayed in studio use because it does in one pass what would otherwise take fifty.

The unglazed back is deliberate. A piece made to hang flat needs a raw back — glaze against a kiln shelf fuses, and glaze against a wall slips. Leaving it bare is how the maker planned the firing and how they planned the hanging, and the kiln marks on it are the record.

The piece carries no mark, signature or stamp and is offered unattributed. Dated on the slab construction, the rouletted and incised decoration, the high-fired copper glaze breaking over the relief, and the deliberately raw reverse — studio practice rather than commercial moulding: c. 1970–1995.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Wall space is the cheapest real estate in a house and almost nobody uses it for anything but pictures.

This does two jobs at once. It is a green ceramic relief that reads as an object from across a room, and it holds things: a bunch of dried stems, eucalyptus, a spray of lavender, a handful of pens, mail, keys, matches. Hang it by a back door and it takes the clutter that otherwise lands on the counter.

The colour is the reason to pick it up. Copper green going rust at the edges is the exact palette of weathered bronze and old garden gates, and it sits against plaster, brick, painted board and raw wood without needing anything else in the room to agree with it. Against a white wall it reads almost like patinated metal until you get close enough to see the clay.

It works indoors and out. On a covered porch, in a garden room, beside a potting bench or under an eave it does the same job it does in a hallway, and the high-fired body takes damp without trouble.

A note on care, starting with the one that matters outdoors. Bring it in before a hard freeze. The glazed face is sealed but the reverse is raw and porous, and a porous body that has taken up water will split when that water turns to ice. Everything else about it is weatherproof; that one thing is not.

For fresh flowers, drop a glass jar or a florist's vial into the pocket rather than filling it directly. The pocket is glazed and will hold water, but a liner keeps mineral deposit out of the glaze and keeps water off the raw back.

Hang it on something that will actually hold it. Stoneware is heavy for its size — use a wall anchor or hit a stud, not a picture pin, and check that the hook seats through the hole rather than bearing on the glaze edge.

Dust it with a soft dry brush, which gets into the incising and the rouletting better than a cloth, and keep the unglazed back off wallpaper and off anything it can mark.