‘I enjoy the challenge of replicating every detail of the plant: first observing and dissecting the living plant and then modelling each component by hand. I am awed by the complexity of a plant’s construction and, beyond its botany, how every petal or leaf has a subtle difference in the way it curls or ripples or curves.’

 Zuleika Melluish is a London-based ceramicist whose work seeks to describe plants in both their physical form and pictorially, whether viewed individually or grouped together. Her work takes direct inspiration from the plants around her, from the Wisteria that covers the outdoors walls of her Kentish Town studio to the perennial garden that she has had the opportunity to create from scratch in the foothills of the Cambrian mountains, Wales. Having begun her work in clay with functional ware, suspending the pressed impressions of plants into their forms, over the last two years she has been developing a series of botanical sculptures in porcelain which were shown for the very time at Collect fair, Somerset House, in March 2023.