Limited Masterworks Mirror Sia

Travels - whether to distant continents and countries or closer to home - regularly fire the imagination of MEISSEN artists of all ilks and hues. Unfamiliar terrains, plants, creatures and, of course, people having different languages, mentalities and customs can alter an artist's perception of what is beautiful in the world and provide them with a virtually never-ending supply of novel creative stimuli.

It was not on a vessel or wall plaque that our porcelain painter Michaela Stocker recorded her impressions of a trip she made to Australia but on a miniature porcelain mirror. Her "Sia" scheme, which plays on the vernacular greeting "See ya" so beloved of the Australians, documents a few of the species of flora and fauna characteristically associated with "down under". Fine-textured red soil from the outback has, for instance, been sifted onto the porcelain here to yield fluffy copper-coloured clouds of varying density. Meanwhile, golden scrubland with no end of plant life is juxtaposed by lush tropical vegetation from the fertile coastal regions of northern and eastern Australia in the form of orange bird-of-paradise, gloriously colourful wild plantain and dark green ferns.

Ultrafine brushwork has been used to render a Major Mitchell's cockatoo along the top edge of the mirror in the orange and brown of the prevailing palette. This rare, endangered species is considered one of the most beautiful of all parrots on account of the transverse stripes on its crest and its pink-hued plumage. All in all, then, "Sia" adds up to a most extraordinary feat of Meissen porcelain art in which more than three centuries of European art-handicraft enter into a compelling symbiosis with the unique nature to be encountered on our oldest continent.