Article from the London Financial Times - 8th & 9th April 2000

Jamming With Ceramics

Holly Finn drives out from the Cape to find pristine painting and perfect butter holders...

Suspending your disbelief is a lot easier when you're in the middle of the Cederberg Mountains north of Cape Town, waking to the trill of bokmakierie birds. Take a morning drive in the Land Rover, out across the veld, and clamber up the sandstone to caves where 5,000-year-old tribal paintings remain, nearly pristine.

When you head back for breakfast, al fresco, of course you're in the mood to be impressed.

Still, you have to notice, amid the clutter of mango juice, smoked salmon-trout, and napkin-swaddled toast, a trio of small, painted ceramic bowls. Nothing special, really - except they are.

Filled with jam, marmalade and honey, these zebra, tiger and leopard-printed receptacles make the domestic seem tastily exotic - wherever you put them (R12 each, about £1.15). Keep plunging your knife into a plain glass jar if you must, but you're missing out on dollops of style.

The bowls are the work of Rainbow Ceramics, a company based in Sea Point, near Cape Town, owned by Daniela Bonnici, a fourth generation Capetonian and a ceramics painter. She started the business 12 years ago, as a hobby. Now she completes each item, by hand, with the help of two other women.

Of the team, one pots, another paints the backgrounds, and the third adds the detail. "We have all three South African races in the shop," she says, "white, coloured and black."

Together, they create whimsical bowls and pots, cups and saucers, and novelties that manage comfortably this side of touristy. A pair of ceramic legs, one for salt, one for pepper, saucily crossed on a ceramic easy chair (R135), does cross the line, but it still makes you smile.

Bonnici is also planning production of my new favourite butter-holders, in terracotta. They look like a plain old cylinder and matching top. But lift the lid, and you find it's not a skinny thing, but 11/2in deep - with butter pressed into it. Ingenious, really. Pop a few cubes of ice in the cylinder bottom, then place the lid on top. Your butter's kept cold, and safe from flies, even when it's hotter than Africa hot.

These are attractive because they are both simple and clever. (Another smart version - one bowl nestled in another - is available now, R75.) The miniature jam bowls are good looking because they are so carefully painted. If you saw them at Browns - the sort of place you're likely to find them one day soon - you'd covet them, and pay a lot more.

The R45 zebra-printed demitasse cups (and matching-patterned spoons) are worth noting, too. They are so crisply detailed they call to mind the signature stripes not just of any zebra, but of the very rare Cape Zebra. It has sharp black and white lines - with no fuzzy grey in between. A find, believe me...