Paradise Vase

Part of the PROVENANCE drop. One of a kind, made with ceramic clay, underglaze, finished with a clear gloss glaze. 

It reads like something unearthed rather than made - carried out of a temple no one remembers the name of. PARADISE runs near the rim like an inscription half-translated, the last legible word of some longer prayer the clay has since forgotten. Below it the surface fills with cobalt marks that feel less like decoration and more like a record kept in a language just beside our own: a drifting cloud, a scatter of stars, holy swans from heaven.

The story - for those who like a story - goes that vessels like this were never meant to hold flowers at all, but to hold attention. You set one down and the room reorganizes around it. You catch yourself looking. Whether that's the cobalt or the lean of the clay or something the maker pressed in on purpose is, as the record states, unknown.

The form leans and breathes the way only handbuilt clay does - no machine smoothness, no two sides alike - carrying the quiet authority of an object that has outlived several owners and isn't worried about outliving a few more. Stand a single dried stem in it, a few stalks of something gathered on a walk, or leave it empty and let it be exactly what it is.

Glazed and sealed to last another age or two. Painted once, by hand, and never again.

Ceramic clay, glaze, 19cm high, 7cm diametre.