
By Simone Bodmer Turner’s own admission, moving an entire ceramics studio “involved a lot more than I understood.” But that’s exactly what she’s spent the last year and half doing, after deciding to leave Brooklyn for the idyllic expanses of Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts—and her practice along with it.
But today, she has some big news: her kilns are up and running. And so is an online shop that will offer a new collection of vases.
Called “Spade Vessels,” it is the artist and designer’s first creative endeavor in ceramics since her lifestyle shift. They reflect as much: they exude an organic air, like a flower peeling open or the lips of a fish. “They have a wide mouth shape,” says Bodmer Turner. The body of the pieces, however, takes on the silhouette of a classic urn. “They come from this very classical shape that you see often in garden design,” she adds.
Photo: Scott McDonough
Bodmer Turner says that she was inspired by a sense of countryside practicality. When living in New York City, she would buy all of her pre-cut flowers and mostly worked with smaller stems. Now, she can forage them on her own—and needs a vase to hold larger, rugged blooms and grasses. “It’s really a product of being here in the countryside for the first time in designing these vases in a place where instead of going supermarket or the bodega carefully choosing a few stems of expensive florals that have been brought into the city for the first time, I take my clippers out on walks, go out into the fields, and cut whatever I’m seeing,” she says. “The fact that they can hold a much more abundant arrangement feels very suited to being here and suddenly having flowers just growing everywhere wild on the side of the road.”
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