Lori Rollason in her Hillsborough pottery studio.

Instead of buying off the rack, potter Lori Rollason remembers shopping in the 1960s for vibrant fabrics to sew her back-to-school outfits. Making clothes by hand reinforced Rollason’s belief that items should last longer than trends do. “It was always the approach we took,” she says. “And I always gravitated toward the more patterned, brightly colored fabrics.”

Rollason, of Hillsborough, learned how to throw pots as a high school student in Middletown, Conn. In art college, she restored oriental carpets. In 2015, she received a master’s in art education from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, focusing on ceramics.

To create surface designs on her pottery, she uses two main techniques: sgraffito and slip transfers. Sgraffito involves creating decorations on the surface of the pottery by using a ball stylus to carve through a layer of colored clay slip (watered down clay) that’s been painted over the leather-hard clay pot, to expose the color of the clay underneath.

A variety of objects decorated with screen-printed slip transfers.

With the slip transfer process, Rollason creates a silkscreen print on newsprint paper from patterns she’s drawn and clay slip as her ink. After the slip dries on the paper, she cuts it into shapes, rehydrates them in water, then places the wet shapes on her greenware — pottery that hasn’t been fired in the kiln yet. Rubbing each patterned cutout with a soft spatula-type tool, she transfers the design onto the pot. The slip comes off the paper and then sticks to the greenware, for firing later.

At her potter’s wheel, inside an attached barn at her 1842-era home, Rollason creates these designs for vases, teapots and other ceramic items, drawing inspiration from native plants and flowers in her backyard.

For New Hampshire Home, Rollason explains her aesthetic, finding beauty in simplicity, and how we can learn from the past.

New Hampshire Home [NHH]:

Tell us about your love of structural, physical, musical and historical patterns? 

Lori Rollason [LR]: It seems to me that there are patterns in just about everything, and they can offer a structure or framework for understanding or experiencing the world. I’m curious about the relationships between seemingly disparate things. I’ll confess, I was a terrible student of history in school. Now, I’m endlessly fascinated by it, because I finally realized that one thing always leads to another. Everything has a history and a context.

I like to study an object, considering what led to it, what was the context in which it was made or lived with. So many factors may have conspired to bring it into existence: lifestyles, trade routes, political systems maybe an endless list of possibilities. As an artist, my impulse is to manifest my fascination with patterns in a visual form in my work.

Rollason calls the pattern on this small cookie jar “Flower Power” in a nod to her love for 1960s textile patterns.

I draw on patterns I see in nature. I have a habit of counting petals on flowers and noticing if leaves are in opposing pairs or climbing a stem one at a time. I also look at patterns others have made. I’ve found inspiration in a vintage quilt I inherited. Those patterns are much more graphic and simpler in some ways. Persian rugs are another source of inspiration. While I don’t draw directly from specific motifs on them, I am inspired by the ways the makers chose to stylize nature.

I really like to create an abundant surface, to completely cover the forms I make with imagery. I love to think that each time someone looks at a pot I’ve made, they might discover something that had gone unnoticed. In a funny way, my pots may promote the habit of continuing to look and consider what we’re seeing. The forms that I choose to make are based on historic forms, often objects I’ve seen in museum collections. I’m not trying to recreate the past, but I do like the idea of building on the past, learning and growing from it. We like to say that history repeats itself. It’s actually us who repeat history. I think it’s so important to learn from our past. I want to take valuable lessons (from the past) and make positive things.

NHH: What are some examples?

LR: The forms that I love are in English country homes, like on mantelpieces or in “Downton Abbey” sets. Ginger jars, vases with pedestal bases, teapots. Those forms are really interesting to me, the classic curves, color and light. I love that, to many people, these are familiar forms. This familiarity can create an almost instant relationship with the pieces. I’ve had so many conversations with people that began with, “This reminds me of . . .” .

A row of ginger jars perched on the “work in progress” shelf await the next bisque firing.

To add another layer to the idea of one thing leading to another, I’ll point out that many of the forms I’m inspired by were adapted by potters in Europe —the ginger jar you see with Delft patterning on it, that’s from the Netherlands, but the form itself, I think, came from China. To get the appearance of these beautiful blue-and-white porcelain pieces from Japan and China, artists in Europe coated the entire earthenware pots with white slip (watered-down clay) and then painted on it with a cobalt oxide wash.

NHH: Do you find inspiration in interior design?

LR: I’m interested in making a home feel special and beautiful. I like to look at fireplace mantels and china cupboard shelves to see what’s on them. I make vases for flowers. And then I think about where a specific style of vase would fit in a home. I think a lot about function, too. I want things to be really beautiful, but I also want them to work really well.

NHH: What’s a recent, functional design that you like?

LR: I’ve been working on vases that have a pedestal on them. That’s part of making simple flowers feel grander, more important. I call them “trophy vases,” like a prize. I think flowers are always treasures, something really amazing that nature provides. So I like to be able to put them in something beautiful. The most recent vase form I’ve been working with is called a tulipière, and it’s a historic form. It caught my eye as I was perusing the Victoria and Albert vase collection on the V&A website. Some tulipières are really, really big, almost like a pyramid of flowers. The vases I’ve been making are much smaller.

It’s a bit of a peculiar form, but I love it. The function is amazing because you could just have one small bunch of flowers, like 10 stems from Trader Joe’s, and it fills this vase in such a magnificent way, spreading the flowers apart so you can really see each one. You don’t need a gazillion flowers just to make a really pretty statement.

NHH: How would you describe your aesthetic approach to your surface design?

Rollason demonstrates the sgraffito technique she uses to create many of her intricate surfaces.

LR: In a word, “abundance.” I strive to use patterns and imagery to activate the entire surface of each pot. With my sgraffito pieces, I begin with a specific flower or motif in mind and just start carving. I think about the composition. How can the arrangement of the images enhance the curve of the form? What will it look like when it’s fired? How much contrast will there be between the imagery and the color of the clay pot? I take some creative license. If I don’t want there to be so much white space, I might add a leaf that would never ever really exist with that particular flower.

NHH: What do you think we can learn from the past?

LR: There’s a lot to be gained and remembered and appreciated. Objects from the past help to tell our story, our human history. We’re rethinking how we live with things. Do we give it the care that’s needed, or is it expendable? Is it something you’re just going to use one year and then toss out? My hope is we consider the future when we make choices in the present. Maybe we can take more care of what we have, acquire new things that we truly appreciate and enjoy, and want to be remembered for in the future.

Resources

Lori Rollason Pottery