Lunch plates. I didn’t know they existed until a few weeks ago. Up until then, I had innocently assumed that there were only three types of crockery to worry about: dinner plate, side plate and bowl. Now, I’ve discovered, there are not only lunch plates, but tea plates, salad plates, bread plates…

If you’re as bewildered as I was by this news, click here for this website where there’s a helpful video to take you through the different sizes!

I shared with my mother the matryoshka labyrinth design for the exhibition (see earlier post) and she suggested that it might look good printed onto ceramic tiles. This was something I hadn’t considered but I liked the domestic reference to home. I played with her idea, did some research online into ceramic printing and decided on plates. When sharing this idea with a friend, she suggested ‘luncheon plates’ as being the perfect size – not too big, and not too small. It was then I realised that my knowledge of plate sizing was somewhat lacking.

I took the four themes of the exhibition – mend, home, place, plant – and designed a set of plates around them using the labyrinth design. When my mother was staying with me in the summer, we designed a couple of the plates together. A fifth plate, was based on a beautiful piece of creative writing, ‘relinquishing spring’, that my mother had sent me as part of the project. It was written by her in response to driving through Arisaig woods, and her mother’s dread of the Autumn. This last design uses a paper serviette of daffodils in the background – we found a packet of them in my gran’s house after she died.

‘I feel no fear or dread in Autumn; only the tawny contentment of a land relinquishing the burning zeal of spring and harvest, releasing itself from man’s demand, to return again into its own contemplations and its dialogue with winter.’ (Margaret Aldington)

This is a digital ‘mock-up’ of the ‘Labyrinth lunch plate series – planting peace‘ design. They were printed last week and I can’t wait for them to arrive in the next few days.

What did arrive today was the custom printed lino flooring for the exhibition, 4m x 2m. I’m relieved that it’s been delivered but slightly nervous of opening it after the amount of work that went into getting the file ready for printing on such a large scale – this project and preparing work for the exhibition has provided a wonderful opportunity for me to develop skills and to try out new media.

The lino flooring is a large labyrinth that visitors to the exhibition will be able to interact with, and walk.