Love or lustre?

Inspired by the East Anglian countryside, a potter, poet and songwriter is reinterpreting shimmering Persian lustreware for the modern age, finds Lucien de Guise

- Lucien de Guise

SUFFOLK is about as far from the fairy-tale One Thousand and One Nights as a magic carpet could take you, but, improbably, a little of that increasingly forgotten mystique lives on in the studio of potter Boris Aldridge. He is the most single-minded of ceramicists. His creative niche, which consists entirely of tiles, is made narrower by inspiration drawn mostly from far-off 12th- to 13th-century Persia.

That distant Persia was a cultural high point of humanity. More widely understood in the 19th and early 20th centuries than nowadays, Mr Aldridge fell for its lustrewares above all else: ‘The level of technical knowledge, ambition and flair is truly breathtaking.’

The technique is as demanding as ever. Many firings and prodigious amounts of precious metals mean few cultures have perfected it. Mongol Persia, Moorish Spain and Arts-and crafts-era England did pull off this shimmering feat. The flashes of metallic evanescence helped William de Morgan to revive lustrewares when he and William Morris were tearing down barriers between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ art.