It all began with this bowl,” says Simone Bodmer-Turner. The ceramicist and designer, best known for her sculptural all-white vases, is holding a prototype from her debut line of tableware. “We call it the Tall Boy,” she says. With sides deep enough to wrap both hands around, the design was born out of an obsession with keeping her food piping hot.
Her motivation began three years ago, when Bodmer-Turner moved from Brooklyn to a remote hilltop town in Pioneer Valley, western Massachusetts, and bought a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by 36 acres of land. In her home studio, up on the third floor, the 36-year-old is wearing a black high-necked smock and is surrounded by maquettes and models of the ceramic and plaster pieces she has been creating since 2014 and 2020 respectively. Beside her, a table is loaded with glaze experiments, some resembling giant crystals (she calls them “iceberg testers”). In one corner, a plaster fireplace is moulded into a deliciously organic form; in another, a large-scale relief panel is propped against the wall. Bodmer-Turner runs a workshop in a nearby former brass mill, and tends to her vegetable garden and apple orchard. It’s a rural rhythm that has informed her new 12-piece range of tableware.
