‘The kiln god spoke…’

…and a songbird joined Noreen Jaafar’s repertoire of beautiful tile designs created with her unique Persian glazes. This was the special new design intended for her amazing Gloucestershire Tree House featured on ‘Grand Designs’ last year, and the kiln god – that sometimes-wayward spirit known to all kiln users – had pronounced in favour!

To tile aficionados, or lovers of design in general, the origin or the actual making of a decorative object is a significant part of its value and desirability.  In this respect Noreen’s tiles are to be highly prized. Her chosen medium of Persian glazes, which she studied and developed whilst at Falmouth School of Art in the Nineties, move and flow in the kiln like molten glass. Not only are they highly creative and original, they also require considerable skill to paint and fire.

In the very long and illustrious history of tile making in Persia, the technique of tile making was safely guarded and orally handed from father to son and master to student, and few details of designs, patterns or details of technique were ever documented. Nevertheless, Noreen has produced a palette of 18 bright, pure glaze colours, together with subtle blended glazes, to produce her sea life, animals, birds and abstracts, developing a technique which those eminent early Persian tile makers would no doubt have admired.

Coincidentally, having a restricted palette of colours has a certain quirky link to the Persia of the early 16th century Hafavid period.  At a time when so many religious and non-secular buildings were being constructed, a quicker and more economic method than mosaic tile was needed to weather proof and embellish them, and this brought about the creation of ‘Haft Rang’ – literally Seven Colour – tiles. They were quicker, easier and cheaper to produce but then became a new art form in themselves. The 7 colours were usually black, white, ultramarine, turquoise, red, yellow and beige, later extended to include bright orange, all of which are in Noreen’s palette – but here any similarity to the Jaafar range ends, and the origin of the contemporary range of Persian Glazes begins.

Having long been a stockist and admirer of Jaafar Designs, I recognised that the colours and glazes themselves could be developed into a different kind of art, one which depended as much on the designer/user as the designer/creator. My ‘Persian Glazes’ range has simple shapes and patterns, whose combinations themselves are individual pieces of art. In this I am not only ‘in the moment’ with luminaries such as Smink Things, Popham Design and Alexandre Mancini (amongst many others), but I was certainly influenced by some of the great names in tile pattern design of the past such as Gio Ponti, Athos Bulcao and Roger Capron (amongst many others).

Interestingly, a limited palette of colours imposes a kind of discipline on both the creator and the user, as without the availability of multiple colour shades, it is more likely to dictate a décor than to complement it. In fact, the shapes and colours almost suggest themselves as individual pieces of wall art.

In many countries all over the world, tiles have been used to protect and decorate not only special or prestigious buildings but more mundane settings such as underground stations, stairwells and even the exteriors of domestic dwellings.  In many cases, it was the beauty and originality of the tiles which helped preserve these buildings or settings for posterity.  It would be nice to think that this present movement towards decorative architecture will do the same. The world would not only be a brighter place, but it would also help to bury the idea of the ‘throw away’ society.