Raija Uosikkinen (1962) Pomona from Arabia

Raija Uosikkinen's Pomona series – An Overview

In the 1960s, the entire area around Arabia’s factory in Helsinki was a garden city with beautiful wooden houses, large gardens, and old apple trees. Raija Uosikkinen often found ideas for her patterns from nature and her garden, so she needn’t have ventured far from her studio to find the motifs for Pomona.

The first sketches of the collection – strawberries, plums, and apples on jam pots – are from 1962, but it took a while before they came into production. When Arabia’s product managers saw the prototypes in December 1964, they asked Raija to try to apply the pattern to other products as well. She adapted it to plates, bowls, cups, jugs, creamers, and platters. The results were good, and the new additions became part of the Pomona series, which began selling in 1965.

In the late 1960s, six new motifs were added to the jam pots and creamers. They were blueberries, lingonberries, black currants, gooseberries, oranges, and honeybees.

In total, there were nine different motifs. All nine were drawn in simple comic strip style and bright colors. The style and motifs were in tune with the pop art design trends of the sixties, where strawberries appeared in both Beatles songs and Marimekko fabrics, and apples were seen on everything from fabrics to wallpapers and tiles.

The series also highlights changing social norms and new ways of dining and decorating tables. Pomona was not designed as a traditional tableware series with dozens of pieces. Instead, it was a collection of 16 versatilely useful pieces, of which all models were already part of Arabia’s range. The shared motifs were enough to bind them together into a series.

Pomona was popular in Finland, but sold well even outside the country’s borders, especially in America. This may perhaps have been due to marketing. Pomona pots were bought individually, as a way of renewing the plain old white dinner set at home with something new and modern. Moreover, the various pieces became popular gift items.

Today, some pots from the series are both rare and expensive, especially favorites of jam pot collectors. Perhaps many people see a row of pots in their kitchen as a greeting from the Swinging Sixties!

The Models in the Pomona Series

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