Pottery sounds rather old-schooled, but handmade ceramics are on trend. With the food boom of recent years, the ceramics scene has also evolved. New ideas, techniques and colors stimulate the market. Melanie Follmer is about being more than a trendsetter: With her label 3punktf, she makes the beauty of everyday objects more aware.
If you are pottering then you are in vogue.
There are currently 4,367,441 posts on instagram under the hashtag #pottery. Here you will find the latest ceramic trends and wonderful explanatory videos about the work on the potter’s wheel to “How do I build a Raku oven?”. It is a golden age to familiarize yourself with a craft. The online craftsmen are willing to pass on their knowledge and just watching is fun.
Go to the pottery course in the far north to Bardowick
Under the cherry tree in front of the elongated brick house with the enchanted garden, the breakfast table is already covered. The wonderful cups, plates, bowls, jugs and etageres by Melanie Follmer are not only for sale – they are omnipresent throughout the house, everyday objects.
“You can stay anywhere.”
Melanie’s open house is a cosy, welcoming place. Her 4 children and her husband are used to work and family life constantly mixing. Half of the ground floor and the small barn are now workshop and living space. Melanie employs two permanent employees, interns and a fairy godmother.
The ceramics of Melanie Follmer’s manufacturer 3punktf can be seen in many magazines, cookbooks and blogs. Her name is well-known in the food scene, but one thing makes her especially proud: her big daughter’s friends do not go to IKEA, but come to her to decorate the student apartment with her pottery. Mission accomplished. To teach people the beauty and value of everyday things
“You do not have to believe that you’re going home with a piece of pottery that looks like you’ve imagined.” So our course started with Melanie and she was a good teacher for us. She let us try carefully, made mistakes, then slowly accompany us to the one “aha” experience that meant progress. Help me do it myself and so the most important handles are as burned in.
“You can wear jeans with high heels or with chucks.”
“You design the appearance and style of your ceramics,” Melanie explains to us when we finished our “masterpieces” created one day before. We are still far from that. Pottering can be very meditative, no question, but also frustrating, if the seventh clay lump in a row can not be centered and flies away with a loud “splash”. However, once you have managed to pull up this lump of earth with your own hands and create a cup-shaped something, the world shines in new splendor.
The ceramic of 3punktf is of simple elegance. Melanie Follmer gained the basis for the feeling for the shapes and colours of her different ceramic series in her studies in textile design in Hamburg. After ten exciting years in the fashion industry, filled with many trips and exhibition dates, she has moved to the countryside in Bardowick with her family and started something new.
“I’m not looking for the perfect. I find it more exciting to be able to withstand the imperfect. “
From the pottery course Melanie had attended out of necessity 11 years ago, she was looking for a table service that matched her circumstances and her idea of aesthetics: Handmade, simple, robust and at the same time beautiful and sensual – became a vocation. Today there are six different series under the label 3punktf. Each serie has its own character.
Every plate, every cup, every bowl is intentionally individual, even if they come from a series. The glaze is different, the heights are minimally different. Especially when stacking together you notice this, no part resembles the other 100 percent. “Some of my clients come in and find the enchanted garden beautiful, our open house, my works, and as soon as they have my dishes in their cupboards, they struggle with the individuality of my ceramics.”
Dishes must fit the human being and his surroundings so that the use of the pure everyday object can become a sensual experience.
Each of us has pictures of arrangements in mind that he associates with certain foods. The wooden board for the bacon and cheese, the Sunday dishes for the meal with the grandparents, filled with red cabbage, potatoes and Sunday roast.
It is precisely these images that we try to stylize and sometimes reinterpret in food photography with the selection of dishes, the background and the accessories. With Melanie’s harness, this becomes easy.
Recipe from the book “delicate and juicy” by Petra Hammerstein: Fried chicken from the upper leg. Published September 2018 in the “Umschauverlag”.