A small series of T-shirts developed from the language of ME MERAKI ceramics: clay, making, ancient forms, material culture and the unpredictability of working by hand.
The graphics treat ceramics with a little less seriousness than the objects themselves. Hand-drawn forms meet bold typography, archaeological references meet studio humour, and mud is given perhaps more cultural significance than it deserves. Printed in a single colour on natural cotton.
Designed in Hamburg. Informed by Greece. Made for people who understand that clay rarely follows the plan.
Some mess is intentional.
A celebration of the less polished side of making. Hand-drawn vessels, fragments and traces of the studio are brought together in a one-colour graphic about the inevitable relationship between design and dirt. Because working with earth has consequences, usually on your clothes.
The drawing combines deliberately imperfect ceramic forms with precise typography: the same tension between control and unpredictability that runs through the making process.
Material: earth + water. Significance: apparently high.
Ceramics have spent thousands of years moving between the everyday and the extraordinary, from ordinary containers to archaeological artefacts, museum collections and objects of cultural significance. This T-shirt takes that history perhaps a little too seriously.
A collection of vessels, fragments and one particularly important lump of clay is catalogued like an archaeological find. Each receives a number. One even receives an accession code. Ultimately, however, the material remains remarkably simple: mud, with ambitions.
Reference: ancient. Interpretation: ongoing.
Ancient ceramic forms are an extraordinary archive of proportion, function, invention and human behaviour. They are also not instructions.
Five hand-drawn vessels trace the gradual transformation of an ancient typology into a contemporary form. Proportions shift. Symmetry loosens. Handles move. The hand enters the process. Beside the original sits one small instruction: DO NOT COPY. Because the past provides a background, not a blueprint.