The most frequent comments I come across online are about the meaning of the marks on the pot bases and as you can imagine there have been changes over time.

The first pots I can remember signing were the large Kiekie vessels where I simply signed my full name by scratching into the leather hard clay. Then during my time of creating lamp bases, large vases and large bowls for the interior design market I pressed my full signature into the bases after they were came out of the slip casting moulds.

Once I began decorating, I worked with a rubber stamp with my signature in a circle plus Aotearoa (NZ) and at this stage whoever decorated the piece signed their name and date with an underglaze pencil.

When Crown Lynn was closing down, I would pop in to see Bruce Yallop who was still onsite and running his own business making moulds. I would always chat to Ray Macham who was overseeing the dispersal of the Crown Lynn equipment and Ray often just popped things into my van that he thought I would need in my little art pottery studio.

There was a box of Crown Lynn rubber stamps sitting there and at this point I had acquired a few Crown Lynn moulds and I want to stamp those shapes only with the Crown Lynn stamp. Every week I would ask Ray for them and he would say that he couldn’t give them to me because the Crown Lynn name was still owned.

Anyway, eventually I wore him down, he understood how I wanted to use them, and he let me take them.

So, there is a period just after Crown Lynn closed down in 1989 where a Crown Lynn shape would be rubber stamped with my Catherine Anselmi Aotearoa stamp and with the Crown Lynn stamp and if hand painted, signed by the decorator.

When I opened Crimes of Adornment in what I think was 1992 I was approached by the Auckland City Art Gallery to make a range of cups and saucers to go with their 50s Show. This above card was produced at the same time as the 50s Exhibition.

Somewhere not long after Crimes of Adornment opened, I traded pots for a new logo with a graphic designer and both this and the Crown Lynn logo where produced as decals that we added to all pots.