Time out enabled Jennifer Stafford to get back to basics

Kate Brewer, founder of Look Like Love, profiles a different new designer every week. With the tagline “support, nurture, promote” echoing confessions of a design geek’s own “discover, champion and inspire” and a similar commitment to advocating for emerging talent, the parallels between Look Like Love and confessions of a design geek are clear. Watch out for her features every Thursday afternoon. This week’s designer? The purist designer-maker Jennifer Stafford

The lovely thing about working with new talent, be it a fresh graduate or a determined emerging designer, is the passion about creating something unique – a one-off piece that tells a story, marks a moment in time, for them when they create it, and for the person who eventually buys it. It’s a personal, considered and organic process, that is often missing in mass-produced items. For designer-maker Jennifer Stafford, these aspects of design form the basis of her collections.

Jennifer studied her master’s degree in design at Plymouth University, and she has specialised in bespoke ceramics and lighting from the beginning, first showcasing her graduate collection, Echo Pods at New Designers in 2013. Inspired by Cymatic patterns which reveal the strange and beautiful symmetry at work in nature, the repetition of her forms not only creates an interesting light glow, but a series of ceramic sculptures that can be hung as pendants or clustered at floor level.

I first approached Jennifer about working with Look Like Love back in 2013, but she needed the time to find a studio and set-up a collection that was ready to market. Taking that time out also meant that she continued to experiment with clay, and over time began to focus more on the purity of the material, the forms and the process, and eventually shifted her focus to a simple range of ceramics, entitled The Stripe Collection (below).

Celebrating the natural tone of stoneware clay, every piece is completely hand-thrown on a pottery wheel, making each one slightly different. The stripe suggested by the name is a finishing detail in black, highlighting the clean edges of each piece, the trim of a plate or consuming the interior of a mug or jug.

“The black slip is applied onto the leather hard clay, bisqued and finished with a transparent glaze, with the final firing completing the process,” explains Jennifer.

The same approach also applies to her Autonomous Collection (above and below), a simple range of cast vessels which determine their own shape when various processes are applied to them, again creating a unique piece every time. Gold detailing to the edge, and a simple transparent glaze complete the look.

More recently Jennifer has collaborated with artist Susi Bellamy. Susi experiments with colour, collage and photography, and used a series of paintings inspired by her time living and working in Florence to wrap Jennifer’s Ginger Jars. The rough mark-making combined with the minimal ceramic, work well together in the first of what promises to be many collaborations.

Initially working with the natural palette of the stoneware, and the purity of form and materials, Jennifer has developed a collection which is sympathetic to her craft with a range of simple one-off pieces, with both decorative and functional qualities, she demonstrates that both form and function can work together.

To find out more about Jennifer Stafford, and to purchase pieces from her collection visit Look Like Love.

Further reading for the especially geeky:

• look like love :: sophie cobb
• look like love :: tom hutchinson
• look like love :: emma buckley
• look like love :: michael carroll
• look like love :: eva radulova