Studio Pottery Sphere Vase Ash Glaze, Iron Speckle, Leach/Hamada Tradition, Signed

A small, calmly composed globular vase from the workshop of a studio potter who deliberately works in the Anglo-Japanese tradition of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. Thrown on the wheel, the body shows the fine horizontal grooves of finger marks; irregularly placed iron speckles and deeper chestnut-brown zones, where the iron oxide has condensed into distinctive crystals during reduction firing, are distributed over the green ash glaze. The green ash glaze is one of the classic Leach base tones from St Ives; the characteristic iron speckles are the tool signature of the Mashiko school around Hamada – a formal language that has shaped the international studio pottery vocabulary since the 1930s.

The format is deliberately small and intimate: H 10 × Ø 10 cm, with a narrow mouth, so that a single flower or a dried stem completes the silhouette. The lower zone is left as an unglazed stoneware ring and shows the warm, sandy-colored body – a conscious commitment to the material honesty of the Mingei movement. The base mark bears an incised potter's signature; the condition is very good, no chips, no cracks.