A hand-drawn line between glossy glaze and bare clay
On every piece, a line of coloured slip, drawn by hand, divides the glossy glazed top from the bare, matt lower half. It is the gesture that signs the work of Sue Ure, a ceramicist who trained with the potter Emmanuel Cooper in London and has lived since the 1990s in south-west France, at St Michel, where she throws her prototypes and fires her pieces in three electric kilns powered by her own solar panels.
Her studio makes the ColourPop Studio Collection: jugs, salad bowls and vases in stoneware and porcelain, thrown by hand and painted with bold bands of colour, no two pieces alike.
Made outside France : The Ambit range, in white or black porcelain, is designed and prototyped in that same studio, then made in Sri Lanka by a family-run manufacturer. Tea towels and napkins are hand-woven in Senegal, in organic cotton and linen, and in Crete for the Iraklio series. The melamine place mats come from Great Britain.
Pared-down forms, Mediterranean colour, a mid-century spirit: the site tells the story of each piece and each partner, plainly.
A maker who still throws her own prototypes, tests and retests a glaze until it feels right, and says clearly where each range is made. The raised slip line, a border between gloss and matt, gives everything she produces a signature you can recognise by touch.
