AMY JAYNE HUGHES

The ceramic artist talks Sèvres porcelain, contemporary aesthetics and the unexpected benefits of lockdown, with Dominique Corlett

-  Dominique Corlett

Historic vases are something of an obsession for ceramic artist Amy Jayne Hughes. Since her first significant encounter with them about 16 years ago, they have become the starting point for her creative process, providing both inspiration and something to react against. Exploring her responses to them and reinterpreting their decorative characteristics has led to the much-admired bold, bright, contemporary pieces that she is making today.

Amy’s most recent creations are her ‘After Alhambra’ and ‘After Amphora’ vases, inspired respectively by Islamic vases made in 14th- and 15th-century Spain, and the black and terracotta storage vases of Ancient Greece. In these pieces, Amy honours the forms and decorative motifs of the originals while adding doodled lines, painted sweeps of colour and stuck-on appendages in her distinctive collage style, to simultaneously make them strikingly modern and relatable to a 21st-century viewer.

‘It has to pay homage to the original,’ says Amy. I try to be respectful because they are from a different civilisation that no longer exists. I am fascinated by them and want to make work in response to them.' It isn’t about copying but reinterpreting, Amy emphasises, and she hopes that, in turn, this might bring the original historic pieces to a new audience.

‘It’s about linking past and present,’ she says. ‘I like to work with a brighter colour palette that is fresher, more contemporary, and appeals to me. It’s part of giving them a new lease of life.’