THESIS PAPER - Wendy Walgate

interest and just enjoy what I enjoy. Cooking, serving food on lavish platters, filling large
overbearing vases with even larger overbearing flowers - creating a welcoming,
beckoning spectacle in this place I call home: this half-reality and half-fantasy of
cohesiveness, of familial bliss and quiet security. Domestic objects are intuitively and
historically part of my psyche, and for me to make clay work that embodies the ritual of
domestic use, is a natural and honest pursuit.
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir:
A reception involves something more than merely welcoming
others into a woman's own home; it changes this dwelling into a
domain of enchantment; the social function is at once a party and
a ceremony. The hostess displays her treasures: silver, linen,
glassware; she arranges cut flowers. Ephemeral and useless,
flowers typify the needless extravagance of parties marked by
expense and luxury; open in their vases, doomed to early death,
they take the place of bonfires, incense and myrrh, libations and
offerings. The table is laden with fine food and precious wines.
The idea is to devise gracious gifts, which, while supplying the
needs of the guests, anticipate their desires; the repast is changed
into a mysterious ceremony. Virginia Woolf emphasizes this aspect
in a passage from "Mrs. Dalloway": And so there began a
soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of
aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but
adept in a mystery or grand deception practised by hostesses in
Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when with a wave of the hand, the
traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the
first place about the food - how it is not paid for; and then that the
table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats,
saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in
casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire
burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund
visions before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom
life appears, musical, mysterious.
The woman who presides over these mysteries is proud to feel
herself the creator of a perfect moment, the bestower of happiness
and gaiety. It is through her that the guests have been brought
together, an event has taken place; she is the gratuitous source of
joy and harmony.
During the normal daytime meals of my childhood, our family would eat from Melmac
dishware; a plastic set of plates, bowls and cups that would sometimes come inside
laundry soap boxes as incentive gifts. These dishes could take the heavy use of children
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