They don’t care that you’re a vegetarian. Delicate white plate with handwritten blue calligraphy and triple gold trim on bavarian porcelain.

March 24, 2010

I’m a typographer and the plate is part of an ongoing research I’m doing about how writing and images are used on tableware. It started when i continuously had to look at the ikea logo at the the cheap glasses in my studio after finishing a drink. Then i realized that there is on almost everything a logo, typography, images that subtle but constant deliver information.

I started to look around and i started to not like the situation. So i looked in the past to see where this heritage comes from. For example i remember growing up in my parents house, there were two wooden plates with emblems (armorial bearings) from the town of their forefathers. As a child i never understood what they mean, and i still can’t decode the heraldic details, but to me as a child they generated a mystic aura.

Decorations and emblems are put by men on tableware to tell a story and to represent towards vistors. Mostly the images, emblems and writings on ceramics deliver a nostalgic, sentimental, misty-eyed version of what they represent. With this work I imagined a world were the objects would tell to the visitors, what they know and witnessed about the owners. In this case the plate tells the visitor that they(the owner) don’t care that she or he’s a vegetarian.

click to enlarge

In other works I’m trying to put (at that time revolutionary) quotes from philosophers on plates from that time. In order to research how these plates would react with the content – and in most cases also the other way around the content react with the form. The plate is an original, signed and dated (2010) on the back. The plate is probably fourty to fifty years old.

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