Plagiarism Personified. GICB International Ceramic Workshop, 2015

As winner of the Grand Prize at the 8th Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, Brownsword was invited to participate in the International Ceramic Workshop that accompanied the event (24 April - 2 May). This was an opportunity to engage a visiting audience with the concepts underpinning his award-winning work 'National Treasure', concerned with the movement of cultural knowledge under capitalist forces.

Positioned in the context of recent decades of globalisation in North Staffordshire and its impact upon traditional industry, the workshop cited the early origins of its ceramic production influenced by imported wares from China during the 17th century. This stemmed from Brownsword’s research at the Wedgwood factory in 2003, where the common misconception that the decline in manufacture in North Staffordshire was due in part to the Chinese’s ability to ‘rip off’ designs and sell these products a fraction of what it cost in the UK. To cite this cyclical shift of knowledge and skill, Brownsword echoed the stylistic plagiarism of the Orient by early Staffordshire potters by directly imitating Chinese archetypes. A tomb guardian – carved out in the negative into blocks of clay and cast in plaster yielded a crude copy of the original source, skewing its historical and cultural significance into a new mode of Chinoiserie.

The workshop was part of a wider program for the GICB through which 22 international artists invited to coordinate public facing events.