I found this pottery/clay vase or planter at a local thrift store and found her charming. She’s just under seven inches tall, with a little nose and hand that stick out, carved details, including in the orange of her clothes, and reminds me of a freer/more organic iteration of Bjorn Wiinblad’s pieces like these (though seeing them on First Dibs makes me second guess my choice to pass on a pair of them, including a twin to the middle one, for a couple bucks each!). I’m also not sure how to identify her style of dress or if that’d give more clues for me to look up. She’s got a handwritten sticker reading “Hungary” (folded over in the pic) on the signed bottom.
The photos are with a point&shoot and I had some trouble capturing the colors accurately. The orange really reads as more golden and the teal has a stronger green undertone (probably closest to the photo below). She’s glazed inside with that same teal. The succulent I’ve planted in the pot is an unofficial “cutting”–I found a cluster of three leaves on the sidewalk outside one of those fancy grocery stores that dabbles in home decor and stuck it in soil at home.
This girl-vase came home with me because of the colors and tonal variations in the glazes, her expressive face, her overall shape, and the details worked into the clay: the divots and lines carved out and the button nose and little hand added on.
If you know more about either the Hungarian vase (or the sidewalk succulent!), I’d love to hear it. I’ve done my usual googling for the vase, but pottery-as-objet-d’art isn’t commonly my thing–I’m generally a pottery-as-vessel-for-another-plant person and my choices there are for backgrounds that highlight the beauty of growing things.
