In nineteenth-century India, the popular Willow pattern transferware by Staffordshire found a new life as affixed ornamentations in palace interiors. Set into walls in original form, or broken into flat, rectilinear pieces to meticulously cover walls, niches, and balconies, Blue Willow plates and their luminous blue and white surfaces effectively framed gods and kings and created a multisensory experience of space. Taking two late nineteenth-century sites, Juna Mahal in Dungarpur and Junagadh Fort in Bikaner, as points of departure, Heeryoon Shin explores how the design and materiality of Willow ware, as well as its display, acquired new meaning and purpose in Indian palace spaces. Evoking the tradition of tiled ornamentation and the display of ceramics in the chini khana (“China room”) in India, while also referencing European porcelain rooms, the transferware-covered walls reveal the complex cultural negotiations and material and political aspirations of nineteenth-century India. By examining the Indian reuse of British transferware, this talk complicates the conventional narrative of West looking East and highlights the nonlinear and multidirectional flows of ceramic culture.
Heeryoon Shin is assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College. Her current book project explores architectural revival, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange in eighteenth-century India through the lens of temple architecture in the pilgrimage city of Banaras. She is also developing a second project on the global circulation of blue and white ceramics and their interaction with local production and use in South Asia.
