When Dutch designer Merel Karhof read that Italian ceramicist Antonio Bonaldi could produce pots more quickly than an industrial production line, she decided to set him a challenge.

For her Colour In Time collection, Merel timed how long it took Antonio to make each piece of the collection and then stamped the resulting time onto the side of each bowl or plate.

However she also wanted to communicate the time taken to make each piece through the colour of the glaze, so she created a colour/time graph in yellow, where the intensity of the shade depicted the time taken to create the piece. Ranging from transparent to soft pastel yellow shades for the quickest production times to brighter lemon yellows for pieces that take longer to create.

After careful experimentation, Merel was able to create these varying shades of yellow as glazes. The result is a unique collection with a stunning colour gradient. See Antonio Bonaldi at work on the wheel in the video below.

- A.Morris