Tile Wall. Made for Inside and Out
Tile was one of the first collections in the South Drawn range. It began with clay folded over different forms, explored by Luke Mills, our design director, who knew he wanted to run the design as a linear. The process was eventually refined around a single idea: extruding raw clay through a metal die, which gives Tile the ribbed lines it is known for.
The equipment behind it is a familiar sight in a ceramic workshop. A pug mill kneads and mixes clay, blending bodies for the right colour and consistency, and draws the air out as it goes. That step matters, because even a small pocket of air expands in the kiln and cracks the piece. Potters use the mill to prepare clay for plates and bowls. We fitted it with a tool of our own design, machined in house, so the clay leaves the mill already in form.
Getting there took a great deal of testing, because clay holds a memory. “If you roll a piece of clay out flat, it remembers that shape,” Luke explains. “Fold it over a form and fire it, and it’s trying to get back to where it started. It’s a little bit like timber grain. If you bend it, it wants to bend back.” The mill works that memory out of the clay, and the tool has to be right. “If the tool’s not working properly, the pieces can come out crooked, and then that memory is inside the piece and it fires crooked.”
Tile is crafted by Gargoyles and Dragons, an architectural pottery and ceramic workshop based in Melbourne, and one of our longest-standing relationships. Producing identical pieces from an organic material is its own discipline. “There’s so much skill and attention to detail that goes into refining a ceramic part that’s suitable for production.” The clay bodies are sourced from Australian pits, and when a pit closes, the replacement clay may be technically identical but never fires quite the same. Each time, the testing begins again.
We love working with raw materials, and Tile is left in its raw state, with firing as its only finish. The clay begins close to mud brown, and its colour is set by the temperature it is fired at. Terracotta can move from bright to dull to a deep auburn; ours is fired to an earthy tone. Sand Speckle carries grey undertones, and Black Chocolate is a warm, textured black. Every clay shrinks and fires differently, and within each body, every tile carries subtle differences of its own.
Over the years, one question came up more than any other: is it IP65, and can it go outdoors? The material already could. Ceramic, like brick, belongs outside. Pairing an IP fitting with an organic material is far more complex, and the simplest route, holes and visible fasteners, was never an option. “We wanted the ceramic to be the hero, and any fittings to be as discreet as possible.” The new IP65 bracket holds the ceramic without a visible fastener, and sends light up and down the wall. It washes the surface it is mounted on, then carries onto the ceiling, the eaves or the ground, so the space around Tile does the work.
The process gives Tile its name. “We took an industrial process that’s used to make traditional ceramic roof tiles, and refined it to make ceramic forms that, similar to a roof tile, conceal our lighting components.” The result moves easily between outdoors and in. “What’s nice about Tile is that you’ve got the organic textures and the colouring, but the structure is very architectural.”
Tile is made to order in three clay bodies, with a six week lead time.
