Plate c. 1936

This plate was made by Helmut Hiatt, who lived a long life from 1855 to 1995. Imagine him, maybe later in life, carefully decorating this ceramic plate. The decoration around the edge of the plate is what grabs me: the shells are not painted on, but are three-dimensional, like little sculptures. I can imagine Hiatt carefully attaching each shell, one by one. What was he thinking as he arranged them around the rim? Did he collect the shells himself, each one a memory of a day at the beach? The central image seems to be transferware, a landscape scene—a mountain, a body of water with a ship, all evoking a sense of place, maybe somewhere Hiatt dreamed of. The plate is an interesting marriage of craft and image making. It reminds me that art can be found in unexpected places, blurring the lines between the functional and the purely aesthetic. It speaks to how one artist can find inspiration in both the natural world and the world of printed images, combining them to create something new.