“It’s just an excuse to hang out, really,” says Jeremy Brown of the new collaboration between Feldspar, the Devon-based ceramics brand he runs with his wife Cath, and English-Indian artist Tanya Ling. “It’s a friendship where we get to make stuff.”
What they have made together is a version of Feldspar’s classic-with-a-twist bone china tableware. Each bowl, mug or teapot has been hand-painted by Ling with a “sash” motif — a running ribbon of “classic cobalt” that echoes the fluid ink drawings she has been making for the past decade. “There’s something about blue and white,” she says. “It has a precedent in the history of ceramics — Delft tiles, Wedgwood — but it’s also Yves Klein. It’s Matisse.”
Feldspar was launched by the Browns when they moved from London to Devon in 2016 and has become known for its elegantly uneven designs in crisp white china punctuated with either gold or colourful details. All its wares are slip cast (by pouring liquid clay into plaster moulds) in the UK. “Jeremy’s designs are like personalities, with all their wibbles and wobbles,” says Ling, “but they have this utter sophistication. I love how the spout of his teapot is shaped like Magritte’s painting of a pipe.”
The Feldspar duo first came across Ling’s work over meetings with boutique owner Alex Eagle — one of their first stockists (which now include Liberty, Harrods and Lane Crawford in Hong Kong), and one of Ling’s first collectors. They instantly felt an aesthetic alignment between their practices. “Someone asked us who we’d most like to collaborate with and we said Tanya Ling, but we didn’t know her,” recalls Jeremy. “We didn’t think anything of it really — and then Tanya contacted us on Instagram a couple of weeks later.”
Their first collaboration was in 2021. “We didn’t have a plan at first,” says Cath. “Tanya came to stay with us and then we just experimented in the workshop.” Jeremy adds: “We got all these pieces ready for Tanya; some dried bits of clay, some freshly cast, and everything in between.”
“They just let me mash them up and destroy them,” says Ling, who turned the existing Feldspar pieces into a series of ad hoc sculptures.
“I still don’t understand how it worked,” continues Jeremy. “Tanya did everything the traditionally wrong way. I was like, ‘it’s all going to explode in the kiln!’ But everything came out perfectly.”
What emerged alongside the precarious bone china configurations was “an unexpected chemistry and friendship”, says Ling. She and her husband, art dealer William Ling, have since become regular visitors to the Browns’ Dartmoor home and studio, a former farm building where they live with their three young children. Their way of working together has remained largely unstructured. “It seems like chaos . . . I just literally turn up and stuff happens,” says Ling. “But now something logical, sensible and practical has come about,” she adds, nodding to the new pieces, which range in price from £94 for an ice-cream bowl or cake plate to £540 for a cafetière.
“We work in opposite ways,” says Jeremy of his and Ling’s relationship. “I do everything like it’s painful. I’m not enjoying it. The people around me aren’t enjoying it. Whereas Tanya is such a ball of energy and positivity. Even if I’m working on something separate, I’ll often give Tanya or William a call. It’s like dial-a-cheerleader.”
While the Feldspar process is exacting, “my work is kind of immediate,” says Ling, “like getting on a horse and just riding”. Her current show at London’s Lyndsey Ingram Gallery is titled Incitatus (Latin for “at full gallop”). “It all started because I used to think I was a horse as a child,” says Ling, matter-of-factly. In the former 19th-century stable space, her sparse line drawings have intensified into paintings: multicoloured impasto tangles. There are knotty sculptural forms, too, which resemble ceramics but are in fact constructed in a mix of salt, flour and water. “I just made them in my oven,” she says.
The new Tanya Ling x Feldspar pieces will also be launched in the gallery. “I’m trying to make a table to show them on as well; a walnut and bone-china mix — with Tanya’s sash,” says Jeremy.
This year, Feldspar is planning to branch into ceramic lighting as well as wooden furniture. Ling, meanwhile, has a more personal project in mind: tiles for a swimming pool at her home in south-west France. “I can picture it now,” says Jeremy. “We basically plan to do a collaboration every year until we retire, because it’s so much fun.”
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Tanya Ling’s exhibition of paintings and sculptures, ‘Incitatus’, is at the Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, 26 Bourdon Street, London, until March 14
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