A box of dirty old bisques and Crown Lynn revisited

I received a phone call from Louise Stevenson, the director of Toi Tu Uku, the West Auckland Crown Lynn museum.

“I’ve got a box of old Crown Lynn bisques here, an old guy dropped them off and they appear to be Air New Zealand shapes, would you like them?”

“Oh yes I’d love them” I responded, so I whizzed down to the museum and picked them up. Slipcast in the 1970’s at the Crown Lynn factory in New Lynn is my guess.

There were nineteen oval AirNZ dinner plates, four small AirNZ dessert plates, and a number of random deep round plates – they were dirt and age stained, speckled with marks and I was unsure if they would fire well, and hold the images I was planning to paint upon them.

The oval plates lent themselves well to wall-hung portraits (of a curious kind of course), the round plates inspired me to riff off the well-known designers of the time – Frank Carpay, Dorothy Thorpe, David Jenkin, Mark Cleverly, Mirek Smisek, and the four small dessert plates tell stories of AirNZ’s inflight (if eccentric) crew! They all turned out beautifully with the help of advice from technical experts at Auckland Studio Potters.

I have not included all the nineteen oval plates as that might be too much to digest!

The nice connection here is that my now deceased father-in-law was David Jenkin –chief designer at Crown Lynn for 45 years, and the grandfather of my two children.