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A fresco-like surface texture and depth of rich colour give Elizabeth Fritsch’s hand-built vessels an immediate tactile and visual appeal. They are, however, objects of immense complexity, informed by a formidable range of intellectual interests, from musical theory and mathematics to literature, mythology and geology. Fritsch also explores the paradoxes that arise when the illusory space created by painting on a surface interacts with the real space occupied by a three-dimensional object. Firework XII’s blue-black ground symbolises the night sky. Scattered particles with white flashes appear to float free in space within or even beyond the vessel, an illusion that dematerialises its surface and challenges our perception of reality. Fritsch is the pre-eminent ceramic artist of Welsh origin and, having helped fundamentally to redefine the parameters of the craft ceramics movement in the early 1970s, perhaps the most important potter of her generation.

Vase, stoneware, tall form leaning back slightly, standing on a lentoid base with slight kick in the centre, curved sides rising to a rhomboid rim; the whole painted in coloured slips inside and out, the front and right shoulder with a dark blue ground overlying a black ground onto which is painted a pattern of large and small block-shaped particles in opposing diagonal rows (the large ones running bottom left to top right, the small from bottom right to top left), these particles stretched from cubes to elongated rectangles as they move up and round the form, their front faces painted in white, red, green or blue, their other two visible faces one each in black and yellow ochre, the left shoulder, back, base and inside painted with a patchy green ground overlying a blue ground, a yellow ochre line round the rim.