Tintern Abbey

The other Tintern. The one in Wexford, not Wales. William Marshal's ship caught a storm crossing the Irish Sea; he vowed that if he reached land he would found an abbey. He did, and he did. On a quiet bend of the Bannow River, around the year 1200. He named it for the Welsh house he had inherited through his wife. The Cistercians came over from Wales and built. Henry VIII's commissioners came three centuries later and emptied it; the Colclough family moved in and stayed nearly four hundred years. What's left is grey stone and a slow river and a walled garden the gardeners are still putting back.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.