Look up on a clear night far from city lights and you will find this color: the deep, warm brown-black of the sky between the stars, scattered through with points of golden light that seem to glow from within. Kathy Cady has captured that same nocturnal wonder in the glaze of this wheel-thrown porcelain urn, and the result is a vessel of unexpected, quiet magnificence.
The glaze is a rich, variegated brown with deep plum undertones, its surface broken throughout by a scattered constellation of warm gold and cream spots. These luminous markings are not painted on but are the result of glaze chemistry at work in the kiln, minerals separating and rising to the surface during firing to create spots that vary in size and intensity, some tight and bright as stars, others broader and more diffuse, like nebulae caught in slow expansion. The overall ground has a fine, lightly pitted texture that gives the surface a tactile depth and prevents the dark tone from reading as heavy or flat.
The form beneath this stellar surface is beautifully proportioned, wide and round with a compressed, almost cushion-like profile that feels settled and permanent. The shoulder curves generously before meeting the lid, a disc of warm cream and sandy beige that provides a luminous counterpoint to the darkness of the body below. Its pale, lightly speckled surface glows against the vessel like the horizon at dawn.
At the lid’s center, a small faceted clear quartz crystal is set into a clay collar, its transparency and cut geometry offering a final, clarifying point of light above the constellation below.
Mysterious, luminous, and quietly celestial.