Carolinda Tolstoy Signature ImagesImagesImagesImages

A brush with history

Elizabeth Meath Baker meets the London ceramicist Carolinda Tolstoy

You may one day meet Carolinda Tolstoy wearing drab, workmanlike clothes, but I doubt it. At her house in Clapham Old Town, she greets me in a gorgeous skirt hand-painted with gold arabesques. Shoes, similarly painted, are lined up at the foot of the stairs. Her office-cum sitting room has swirly walls. Cushions, handbags, even a plain brown sheepskin coat, are all adorned. "If it stays still long enough, I'll decorate it," she says.

Her fingers are never idle, even when she is away from her wheel or her glazes and brushes. This restlessness means that she has honed her skills by endless repetition, like a medieval apprentice, so that now she can draw freely onto her pots, expanding an all-over design over a large surface without constraint.

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Each piece is thrown on a wheel, fired and decorated in the tiny back-room studio attached to her house. Her showroom is a garden shed. Students have come to her so that they can learn quite how little space is needed to work successfully and commercially. For Carolinda has succeeded more or less single-handedly in getting her idiosyncratic work known and, importantly sold.

She sidestepped conventional education and training, partly because she is severely dyslexic, although she discovered the fact only quite recently. Instead she spent several years at the Chelsea Pottery, where she happily got on with her own thing, as she still does today.

Tolstoy works in red earthenware, with tin glazes, sometimes with lustre, often with gold. All her work, she says, is instinctive, but it is undoubtedly influenced by the forms and decoration of Islamic art: here a pomegranate there a carnation; here a tulip vase, there a glimpse of a Persian manuscript. That she is working in the great tradition of Islamic ceramics is recognised by Professor Ernst Grube, president of the East West Foundation of New York, who has written the forward to a new catalogue of her work.

In some instances she finds herself unconsciously coming closer to the original than she would have intended, led through the execution of the work to the same conclusion as some 16th-century artisan. Yet what she produces is profoundly modern, and it is through her ability to bring the traditional and historic to the free execution of contemporary work that her bowls, vases, dishes and cups come to life.

Cornucopia Issue 27 Vol 5 2002