Hand jiggering, Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd, Stoke-on-Trent, 2003

Derelict Enson Pottery Works, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent

Blackware teapots fused to a saggar, 1750’s
Courtesy of The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

Neil Brownsword has been intensely engaged with the history of ceramic manufacture in Stoke-on-Trent for the best part of twenty years, ever since he was first apprenticed on the factory floor at the age of sixteen. He came to this subject, one might say this obsession, via his formative experience at the Josiah Wedgwood factory, learning various technical skills, before taking the decision to go to art college to study ceramics on his own terms. He needed to explore clay free of the creatively limiting division of labour at Wedgwood (something his own work would in part explore), though always grateful for the knowledge and friendships he acquired there. While he went on to study at Cardiff and the Royal College of Art, Brownsword has never left Stoke, either geographically or artistically. Since leaving the RCA in the mid 90’s, his work has been a sustained meditation on the social, cultural, historical, economic and aesthetic implications of pottery production in this once great industrial centre.

Brownsword has had the almost unique advantage of being both an insider and outsider, one whose family have worked in the pottery industry for generations, but who has also been able to artistically distance himself. He has seen the rich history and economic decline of the Six Towns from another critical perspective – one of both empathy and sharp insight. The story of Brownsword’s own creative growth has also been the story of Stoke’s accelerating dissolution; back in 1948 around 79,000 were employed in the North Staffordshire industry. By 2003 it was a mere 11,000, a staggering statistic, and a descent Brownsword has simply had to address. The sculpture that has emerged has an inevitable duality, both eulogistic and deeply questioning, an art that sees both the positive and negative aspects of the Stoke experience, the social and economic changes manifest in the fabric of clay itself.

After the darkly surreal collaged figures of the 1990’s (that showed both Brownsword’s sympathy and antipathy towards an often alienating work culture, one that offered little release for those on the production line) emerged a new body of work that began to deal closely with the complex substance of clay, making abstract assemblages of the kind of ceramic fragments he had employed in his figures. But now Brownsword was probing deeper, going beyond social critique to another kind of narrative. He was examining and utilising the archaeological landscape of a city built on a vast crust of clay shraff and kiln remnants, of the discarded by-products of manufacture. The extraneous material left on the factory floor, the various props, broken moulds, saggars and wasters have subsequently been combined into evocative ceramic collages; constructions melted and conjoined, transformed by playful manipulation, colour and pooling glazes into something highly visceral. These are objects physically and symbolically charged by association with generations of makers – redolent with memory. They explore the varied physical manifestations of clay but also the metaphorical and elegiac significance of these found fragments, given fresh meaning and potency in Brownsword’s hands. Their appearance speaks of social and economic wastage too.

In Neil Brownsword’s work there is a distinctly subversive negation of traditional craft and technical skill – a subtle response to the more difficult aspects of long labour in the Stoke potteries from an artist who also, paradoxically, has great admiration for those skills. His delicate and poetic amalgams, further fused, warped and mutated by their resubmissions to the kiln, have a strong sense of regeneration. These vestigial landscapes of meltdown and wastage are also about salvage and retrieval. They have an energy, a powerful frisson. Some of these structures, largely made through his ongoing relationship with the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark, are more ambitious and expansive. Others show a miniaturist’s skill, probing the fibre of clay on a much smaller scale. And overall, Brownsword’s constructive alchemy has a strange and fertile beauty. Rarely has the oozing, coagulating, brittle detritus of clay, re-formed and re-fired into another state of permanence, been so intelligently and eloquently expressed. Nor has the history of ceramic manufacture in one place been so elegiacally and poignantly recorded. There is no doubt that Neil Brownsword, still only in his thirties, has established himself as one of Britain’s most radical and searching ceramic artists.

David Whiting

With the industrialisation of ceramics during the eighteenth century, systems of segregated labour brought about a phenomenal concentration of specialist skills and knowledge to specific regions of North Staffordshire. By 1800 the Six Towns of Stoke-on-Trent paralleled China as a world centre for ceramic production. Paradoxically, recent decades have seen centuries of this cultivated expertise being relocated to the Far East, reducing labour costs by up to 70%. Company investment in advanced production technology has further contributed to a massive reduction of an indigenous work force and the closure/demolition of once prevalent sites of historic manufacture.

Having experienced these unique skills first hand, and worked alongside craftspeople with an innate pride in their trade, it is difficult to be emotionally detached from such irrevocable loss. As much of this anonymous dexterity and tacit intelligence remains largely overlooked in relation to the final commodity, a compulsion to illuminate the actions implicit within specific divisions of labour continues to be an ongoing artistic concern. Many assemblages within this exhibition emphasise this ‘human’ element by visually referencing or incorporating within their fabric, discarded clay detritus salvaged from the factory production line. Random arrays of rejected wares, turnings, spares/plugs from casting that speak of the haste of repetition, material command and timing, and other individual judgements essential in negotiating an outcome’s success, are preserved and aestheticized through firing. These momentary imprints of subliminal action retain a vigour and expression alien to the standardisation of mass production, where evidence of human contact is deemed an imperfection.

In an attempt to further reverberate the daily routine of a rapidly disappearing culture of labour, artefacts recovered from redundant factories - sponges, bat frames, steel ‘block’ bands, ware boxes and plate packages are soaked, cast or lined with clay, and fired to make the spaces they once occupied permanent. Likewise, obsolete manufacturing technologies unearthed from the shraff-lined foundations of houses in Stoke are appropriated directly into structures to acknowledge and connect with the skilled endeavours of the past. Material improvisations transform and reinvigorate a once commonplace dialect of Bullers rings, cranks, saddles, saggars, spurs and wasters, into an abstract series of amorphous accretions that emerge through making’s own vocabulary and syntax. This metaphoric exploration of absence, fragmentation and the discarded signifies the inevitable effects of globalization which continue to disrupt a heritage economy which has supported a local population for almost five hundred years.

Neil Brownsword