My mother, Naomi Waldman, who has died aged 91, was a ceramicist, designer and teacher, whose elegant vases of the 1950s and 60s were revived in the 2000s for Habitat’s 20th Century Legends series, and who influenced generations of students with her unorthodox and inspiring approach, to pottery and to life.
The daughter of Ann (nee Rubinstein) and Louis Sorsky, both of Russian Jewish émigré families, Naomi was born in Liverpool, where her father ran a clothing business. At 16 she entered the Liverpool City School of Art and then went to the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, from 1947 to 1950. At Oxford she met Stanley Waldman, a law student, who later became a barrister specialising in employment law; they married in 1951 and settled in London.
In her final year at the Ruskin, Naomi had entered the annual Vogue talent contest, and as a result was offered a job at Condé Nast as assistant art editor, working on Vogue and House & Garden. She left Condé Nast after a couple of years in order to set up her own pottery studio. Her distinctive and beautiful vases and lamp bases were featured in magazines and sold in Liberty and Heal’s.
Many years later, Georgina Godley, head of home accessories at Habitat, approached Naomi with a request to reproduce her vases for their 20th Century Legends season of collaborations with “design legends of our time – people who reinvented the possibilities of furniture and how we live”, who also included Robin Day and Kenneth Grange. The “Naomi Waldman vases” featured in the 2001/02 season were so successful they remained in the catalogue for several years.
Alongside her pottery, Naomi became a freelance designer of magazines and travel brochures. In 1968, she started teaching art and pottery, first at Putney high school and then at Camden school for girls, where her sixth form pottery class was known as a place for artistic endeavour and fascinating conversations about art, life and love.
In 1980 she founded a small business, House Finders, helping international clients find and re-configure homes in London. She designed several impressive interiors, and in doing so she discovered a panoply of talented young furniture designers and artists to commission.
She had an enormous generosity of spirit and an innate instinct to find fun and joy. When her elder daughter, Nicola, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis as a teenager, for 20 years Naomi nevertheless helped create an atmosphere of laughter, gregariousness and enjoyment.
In her final years, she bore Alzheimer’s disease with typical panache – she always looked for the positive and profoundly believed in making yourself and others happy.
Stanley died in 1989, and Nicola in 1992. Naomi is survived by two children – Jenny and me – and four grandchildren, Sam, Rosalind, Alex and Francesca.
