The corner and edge tiles have been photographed separately on this site and have their own pages. I made them by trailing slip onto leather-hard clay.
As for the phrase, it’s a line I used in one of my novels, Alternate Susan. I don’t know what it means. It didn’t really belong in the novel, but I left it in for a long time because I just like the way it sounds. I eventually took it out of the novel, but by that time I’d already made these letter tiles spelling out the phrase. After cutting rectangles out of soft clay, I fired them, then painted on the letters using black stain and a paintbrush. When they’d dried, I carefully painted several layers of translucent beige glaze.
The black filler tiles are scraps from our plates we got as wedding gifts. They were our everyday plates, from Target. We still eat off most of them. The blue and gray scraps are from plates we also use daily, from bowls I bought in Japan, and from porcelain bowls I made in Japan. Once you’ve carried pottery in your duffel bag across the Pacific by yourself, you’re loathe to part with it, even when it’s broken.
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It reminded me of Yeats – though almost precisely the opposite sentiment:
“Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmith make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…”
(Sailing to Byantium)