Sunday 20 October 2013

Ceramic Inspiration


Not many would imagine that throwing a six week ceramics festival every couple of years would be the answer to a blighted East Midland town’s dreams, but that’s exactly what Stoke-on-Trent has been doing for the last six years – with this year’s festival marking the third – and its organisers and participants appear to have every faith that this event will be pivotal in turning this once mighty china town around.
I'm certainly no expert on ceramics, but I've increasingly found myself drawn to its fragile, tactile and luminous qualities and have noticed that more and more people are doing incredibly creative things with clay. Not just Grayson Perry. Ceramics seems to be having 'a moment'. And Stoke's British Ceramics Biennial (on until November 10th) is the most glorious example of the different things you can do with this, the ultimate malleable material. There are world class ceramicists competing for the biennial's £10,000 award, with a display of the finalists' work in Stoke's Potteries Museum. From Claudia Claire's inspirational painterly pots, depicting scenes of everyday human horrors and triumphs, to Malene Hartmann's roomset, complete with ceramic acorns which play eerie nursery-rhymes for the lumpen clay creature resting in the cot.


Danish artist Malene Hartmann Rasmussen created a spooky 'nursery' setting - one of the Award contenders

Airspace, the city’s main contemporary art gallery, is densely packed with teetering towers of fragile white china, looming like ghostly stalagmites, created by artist Corinne Felgate. Called ‘Totem: Trajectories in Tragedy & Triumph’, the work uses discarded biscuit and hand cast pieces of Spode retrieved from the company’s former site, to evoke ‘the rise and fall and resurrection of the British ceramic industry’.


Artist Corinne Felgate's Airspace show, called Totem: Trajectories in Tragedy & Triumph.

  But few experiences are as poetic as a visit to the main venue, the Spode factory, vacated in 2008 when this giant of British china production closed down. Despite the autumn drizzle, we find two Airspace staff happily patting flowers into a large circular flower bed at the entrance – though weeds and bushes and untrimmed trees proliferate behind them. 


Spode's china workers famously spent eight years learning how to make these exquisite china flowers at speed.

 Inside this huge cathedral of manufacturing, under its vaulted ceilings and massive windows, there are not just exquisite examples of ceramic art at its finest but also initiatives aimed at ensuring ceramics has a future. For example, the Craft’s Council’s ongoing ‘Firing Up’ campaign to teach art teachers how to teach ceramics in school has resulted in an exhibition of some excellent work by secondary school students. And there is ‘Fresh’, a celebration of the best work from recent graduates from the few colleges around the UK that still have any ceramics capability (now that there are only two art colleges left in the country that still offer a ceramics degree).

Lisa Marie Svensk's wobbling ceramic figures were part of the Fresh exhibition of the best graduate work from 2013.

There are other community initiatives. There have been outreach projects with ceramic artists working with prison inmates as well as mental health users to make exuberantly impractical or simple and functional things out of clay. A pilot scheme, ‘Typecast’, providing therapy through clay and ‘mindfulness’ practices for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, has been so successful that it has attracted new funding and European partners.
All through this massive complex of buildings we see the fruits of the last two years’ residencies, collaborations, commissions, education and enterprise projects. New this year are the four artist-led, sponsored pavilions in Spode’s ‘China Hall’. 
Also new this year is the revelation of rooms within the sprawling Spode complex that were previously out of bounds – for health and safety reasons. Students of Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway have been exploring and animating these spaces as part of their ‘Topographies of the Obsolete’ exhibition. 
In order to secure city approval for visitors, Bergen Academy actually stumped up the cash to have these areas made safe. Most moving is the old boardroom, with its magnificent parquet floor restored (thanks to the Bergen grant), and its wood paneled walls all buffed and beautiful. But the showcases that line these walls, most poignantly, have been left empty with the dust – and the drag marks - just where they were when all the firm’s trophies were removed. 
The whole experience is haunting and inspiring. You can't but wish this town and everyone who has participated in all of these initiatives the best of luck in reviving both the appreciation and prosperity of ceramic art. I'm certainly never buying an Ikea plate again! 
The British Ceramics Biennial is on until November 10th.
http://www.britishceramicsbiennial.com



Bergen student Anne Stinessen has recorded a series of 'interviews' with the building in her red book, as part of the Academy of Art and Design's collective exhibition: Topographies of the Obsolete: Vociferous Void.



A small selection of the 300 unique vessels that stream across one of the Spode workroom floors, in tribute to the 300 workers who were employed in this factory before it shut down. All of them were found in the abandoned building.


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