Traditional English Pottery Takes on a Modern Flair

At first glance you could be forgiven for mistaking the butter dishes, salt boxes and serving platters adorned with the figures of soldiers or fair maidens as pieces from another time. Created in the perfectly imperfect tradition of English slipware, Sophie Wilson’s ceramics look as if they belong in a decorative arts museum or perhaps on the kitchen shelves in an English aristocrat’s country pile.

“England has an incredible history of ceramics, and it is often a wonderfully dauby, clumsy tradition,” Ms. Wilson, 50, said from her Dorset studio. Her signature slipware — a style associated with the Staffordshire potteries of the 17th century — is created by coating semihard red clay pieces with liquid white clay (the “slip”). The wet surface is then etched to reveal the red clay beneath using the centuries-old decorative technique called sgraffito.

The designs on Ms. Wilson’s ceramics, sold under the name 1690, are peppered with literary, folk and art references, spanning 16th-century English blackwork embroidery, 18th-century botanical prints of the German botanist Johann Christoph Volkamer and the modernist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

The aim is not to recreate the past, Ms. Wilson said, but to give “an interpretation of something that exists in the memory; I love to think I’m bringing this tradition into contemporary homes in a tiny way.”

She also tries to reflect different aspects of life. A 35-centimeter (almost 14-inch) plate etched with the words “As the rose so is life,” a phrase that Ms. Wilson saw on a 18th-century pillbox, is available with three choices of decoration: two men holding hands, two women holding hands and a man and woman holding hands. “Decorative objects become comfortable and familiar over time and so are great vehicles for communicating important memories or messages,” she said. “I want my children to be completely au fait with all kinds of love, so I made a point of creating work which represents all kinds of attraction and endearment.”