Mudlarking

Biscuit (cookie) flavour: Sea salt and brown sugar

Decoration: Royal icing base. Designs created by hand using a combination of painting (with gel food colourings, edible lustres, and vodka), piping, and glazing (with piping gel). Aged effect created using a sgraffito technique. You can find a video of my biscuit ageing process here. The pins and beads are piped in royal icing and painted.

Context: Inspired by objects collected by mudlarkers on the foreshore of the Thames.

Moving in a clockwise spiral from the top left, the biscuits recreate: Victorian stoneware (@thisisyogic), c. late-1600s Westerwald pottery sherd (@thisisyogic), 17th/18th-century delftware (@thisisyogic), Staffordshire slipware (@thisisyogic), part of a Victorian ruby lustreware tile (@jasonmudlark), a c.17th century German salt glaze Westerwald pottery sherd (@flo_finds), a fragment of a Bartmann medallion (@thisisyogic), decorated lead (@thisisyogic), a triangular sherd of Victorian transferware pottery (@thisisyogic), a Roman coin (@flo_finds), and more 17th/18th-century delftware (@thisisyogic).

Find out more about Tom Chivers’ (@thisisyogic) mudlarking collection and his book, London Clay, here. You can find @flo_finds and @jasonmudlark on Instagram.