In Praise Of... Blue and White

Slice a spade into any British garden and you will almost certainly find a chip of blue and white pottery, enough in total to make a dinner service for every family in the country. Gardening lends itself to contemplation, and the shards of delicately patterned porcelain prompt all sorts of musings: was there an imperial catastrophe which prompted all Victorians to rush outside and smash their best plates in mourning? Or did clumsy servants use herbaceous borders to hide the aftermath of kitchen accidents? The answers will be legion and are perhaps best left mysterious, but it is nonetheless inspirational of Bath's Victoria Art Gallery to lay on an exhibition devoted to blue and white for the next two months, with three artists reinterpreting the theme in paintings, textiles and fashion wear.

Hundreds of pieces of (intact) pottery on display show how our natural love of the color combination, seen in the shifts of clouds and sky, or a seascape of breaking waves, transfers so brilliantly to the genres of willow pattern and Delftware. The Dutch city, as it happens, is one of the few places to show signs of tiring of blue and white: its current promotional slogan is "Discover the other colors of Delft". A visit to Bath could refresh the burghers, and also open a new outlet for their enterprise, which first adapted Chinese pottery patterns in Europe. Candace Bahouth's "Prada shoes", encrusted with broken scraps of blue and white found in the artist's garden, suggest a bright and hard-wearing new future for clogs.