Seeping Color into Clay - Emma Buckley, UK

Bath School of Art and Design graduate (2015) Emma Buckley has colored a range of decorative ceramic tableware by letting dye seep up through gaps in the glazing. Instead of using a colored glaze to determine the hue of the vessels, Buckley's technique allows the clay pieces to absorb dye on their own after they have been fired and glazed.

Buckley's ceramics are hand-thrown, fired, and finished with transparent glaze before a small gap is sandblasted into the base. When immersed in fabric dye, the porous clay gradually absorbs the coloring to create an intensity of hue unobtainable with traditional methods.

The designer developed the coloring method during her degree in 3D design at Bath School of Art and Design, while searching for new applications for the bright colors used in fabric production. "There is a vast palette of really great colors you can achieve using dye, which seemed to be unique to the textile industry," she told Dezeen. "I wanted to find a way to apply these colors to something other than textiles, so I started dyeing lots of other materials to see if there was anything that would take to the dye as well, and I came across ceramics."

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First test using a bisque earthenware cup that had been soaked in scarlet-colored acid for 20 hours.