Duncan Ross
Duncan Ross is a British potter. He works exclusively in terra sigillata, an ancient Mediterranean style of pottery (“solely clay and smoke”). His work is beautiful and the home page of his website has a little flash show of some of his best pieces. Enjoy.
Enough profound speculation. Show and tell now.
Chiyogami (“paper of 1000 colors”) is a cheap, block printed sort of washi paper.
Those steeped in Japan’s wabi-sabi aesthetic are forever surprised just how gaudy Japanese art can be. A 16th century texts attempting a synthesis of the two tastes suggested that “dull quenched gaudy”; the truth is that it provides just the sort of background against which gaudy shines all the more brilliantly: chiyogami stands out beautifully against the dull background of untreated wood architecture and grey- 0r indigo-colored domestic clothing.
One buys it in sheets and uses it to wrap gifts; or books; or clothes; or anything that needs wrapping: a use of beauty in everyday life of the sort now long since banished in our own, western lives impoverished as they are by the combination of kill-joy Judeo-thinggie, utilitarianism, and plain unwashed ignorance.
Enough talk.
Now, please yourself.
Notes on The Cultured Life 
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