Name: Al-Hayat Tree • Décor Plate
Brand: My Store
Price: 825.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

Al-Hayat Tree • Décor Plate

£825.00

Al-Hayat Tree • Décor Plate

£825.00

★★★★★ Rated 4.8 on Google · Read reviews

Handmade by independent makers

• Quantity to Order

The tree of life has meant the same thing across every culture that has ever drawn it.

The tree of life at the centre. Cobalt and copper, symmetrical, rooted. A symbol that has meant the same thing across cultures and centuries, painted here by hand in a tradition that has never stopped.

45 cm diameter · 3 cm height · One of a kind.

45 cm diameter · 3 cm height · 3 kg
Handmade in Spain
Wipe gently with a soft, dry cloth
Avoid abrasive cleaners or dishwasher use.

DELIVERY
All orders dispatched within 5 working days

United Kingdom
• Costs: 1 Vase or Decorative Plate £18.00
• Free UK delivery on orders over £150.00

Europe
• Costs: Costs: 1 Vase or Decorative Plate £25.00

USA & Canada
• Costs: Costs: 1 Vase or Decorative Plate £60.00

RETURNS
• You have 30 days from delivery to return anything, for any reason. Email team@cardoonstudio.com with your order number and we'll take it from there.
• If something arrived faulty or not as described, we'll refund your delivery charge too.

REFUNDS
• Processed within 10 days of receiving your return, back to your original payment method.

This one goes on the wall. Not as decoration. As a statement about what you find beautiful. The cobalt deepens in low light. The copper catches it differently depending on where you hang it, morning sun or evening lamp, it shifts. A plate that changes with the room rather than sitting still in it.
Works alone or as part of a considered wall. Either way it asks to be looked at.

Lustreware did not merely decorate the Mediterranean. It moved through it like a currency of culture and identity.

The technique began in ninth-century Mesopotamia, travelled west through Egypt and North Africa, and took root in Al-Andalus, where Islamic artisans built entire lives around the kiln. When Valencia came under Christian rule, potters from Málaga brought their knowledge north. The two traditions met, merged, and produced something neither could have made alone.

By the 15th century, the workshops around Valencia were supplying fine ceramics to the wealthiest courts in Europe. The Arab traveller Ibn Battutah had already written of Málaga's gilded pottery being exported to the remotest countries. That reach, that reputation, was built entirely by hand.

Knowledge was never written down. It passed from parent to child through proximity, repetition, and an intimacy with fire and clay that accumulated over lifetimes. That continuity survived conquest, displacement, and industrialisation, carried by communities who understood that to lose the technique was to lose something of themselves.

What remains today is not nostalgia. It is a living practice, still rooted in the same Valencian soil, still held in the hands of makers whose identity has always been inseparable from what they make.

Pink clay from Valencia, fired twice. The first firing sets the form. The second happens in a traditional reduction kiln, starved of oxygen with rosemary leaves, forcing the metallic oxides in the glaze to bond directly to the surface. This is lustreware, a technique so particular to its conditions that no two firings ever produce exactly the same result.

The result shifts with the light. Not a coating. A transformation of the material itself.

This technique has been practised in this region for over a thousand years. Today only a handful of makers still know how to do it.

This is what Glenn Adamson, in Fewer Better Things*, calls 'material intelligence'; a knowledge that lives not just in the hands, but in an understanding of how clay responds to heat, how fire behaves without oxygen, and how a surface that cannot be entirely controlled is precisely what makes it irreplaceable.