Conjunctions, in The Clay Reader - Scoria, Scoria Jeju Scoria

Neil Brownsword was one of 13 invited artists participating in The Clay Reader: Scoria, Scoria Jeju Scoria, a residency funded by the Jeju Culture and Art Foundation programme, South Korea. The aim of the project was to explore the creative potential of a volcanic soil particular to Jeju Island known as scoria.
However with the Covid-19 pandemic, a small quantity of scoria was sent to all artists to work with in their respective countries and familiar settings.

Brownsword's experimentation with the material lead to a film based work (https://youtu.be/_uuZ9e0vAYs) which explores the conceptual meeting points of raw materials from two different regions of the globe. By situating material investigations in North Staffordshires geological clay seams, Brownsword set about transforming the properties of scoria in combination with clays dug and fired within the immediate landscape. Drawing on the theories of Paul Freyabend's epistemological anarchism curiosity lead a series of impromptu methods of forming using industrial detritus gleaned from the surrounding pottery waste tips (moulds, shards) where discovery and 'failure' intertwine.

The work was disseminated through an online exhibition and publication: Conjunctions, in Kwon, K., & Kim. H., (Eds.), When, in what form, shall we meet again - Jeju Scoria, City Art Community, pp. 150-153. ISBN 979-11-9729999-1-9.

Abstract:
Neil Brownsword: Conjunctions

Context
North Staffordshire’s unique geological outcrops of clay and long flame coal, meant that an abundance of materials essential to the production of ceramics, could be gleaned from the immediate landscape. From the 1670’s difficulties in securing regular supplies of Chinese porcelain led the Dutch East India company to import a range of tea wares from southern China. Yixing redwares - especially prized for their heat-retaining properties, were subsequently imitated in North Staffordshire when Dutch silversmiths John and David Elers migrated to the region after locating suitable seams of haematitic clay in the 1690s. As silversmiths the Elers were familiar with the use of moulds for casting precious metal, and are believed to have been the first to have transferred this knowledge, casting liquid clay into plaster moulds - a pioneering process that later revolutionised mass production. Where the Elers established their early manufactory in Bradwell Wood holds particular personal resonance, as it remains an area where I first encountered clay as a child in its geographic abundance. By the 1720s, as tea drinking became firmly established with England ‘s nobility, the market for potters had significantly widened bringing greater quantities of low price wares into the reach of the less affluent. Growing consumer demand for finer ceramics led to the introduction of new wares and technological innovations, which changed the organisation and structure of factories to accommodate these new techniques. Perhaps the most important development was that of a local workforce becoming increasingly skill specialised through new divisions of labour - a process that was to result in the integration of a population into an industrial economy led by the manufacture of pottery.

By 1938 half the workforce of Stoke-on-Trent worked in pottery factories with employment peaking in 1948 to an estimated 79000 people. To this day Stoke-on-Trent, continues to be affectionately known as the ‘Potteries’ - one of the few British cities with a distinctive regional identity and heritage that remains synonymous with a particular industry. During the last three decades, however, many North-Staffordshire-based companies have struggled to compete in both domestic and export markets. In the 1990s, many factories were forced to outsource production to East Asia, where energy and direct labour costs were a fraction compared to those in North Staffordshire. The physical evidence of this industry’s regional impact is evidenced not only in the abandoned factories and sites of opencast clay excavation, but also within its substrata where the failed residues of manufacture known as shraff accumulate. Reclaiming this industrial Anthropocene has underpinned empirical investigations within this project, which remains conceptually rooted within the histories of global knowledge exchange between East and West.

Process
The only principle that does not inhibit progress is anything goes ... Without chaos, no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress... For what appears as ‘sloppiness’, ‘chaos’ or ‘opportunism’... has a most important function in the development of those very theories which we today regard as essential parts of our knowledge... These ‘deviations’, these ‘errors’, are preconditions of progress.
P. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, 1975

As I revisit the epistemological anarchism put forward in Paul Feyerabend’s polemic ‘Against Method’, it immediately activates a necessity to challenge the sophistications of knowledge that accrue via one’s own practice. Fundamental to this, is a desire to embrace opportunities posed by geographic, material and technological limitations to stimulate risk and development of new knowledge. On returning to intimate childhood playgrounds within my regional landscape, new connections with the material culture of Stoke-on-Trent re-kindle a process of excavation and transformation using a rudimentary set of technologies. Shraff tips yield a whole range of rejected materials from historic production including moulds, shards and various kiln technologies. The ‘desire to reactivate this ‘charge’ of the once commonplace in a contemporary context, led to these materials being appropriated and relocated to Bradwell Wood - an important geographic site connected to the origins of the ceramic industry. Prominent features which litter this region are the exhausted sites of opencast excavation, known as ‘marl holes’, from which clays were/are quarried for brick and tile production. Dislocated from the familiar settings of the studio, here materials indigenous to two distinct cultural histories collide via a series of experimental unions that fuse interactions of making and performance with the site specific.

Following North Staffordshire’s expansion as a center of ceramic production during the early eighteenth century, it's endeavors to emulate Chinese porcelain, through combinations of raw materials imported from other parts of Britain and overseas, yielded new traditions of white salt-glaze, creamware and soft-paste porcelain. Wedgwood’s philosophy ‘everything yields to experiment’, achieved what was then an unparalleled unity between the sciences and the arts. His empirical invention through countless systematic experiments led to his perfection of both Queen’s Ware and Jasper bodies. By citing this period risk taking and innovation, my technical knowledge of the ‘performativity’ of matter is side-lined to favour intuition and curiosity. My laboratory is the ‘marl hole’, where a hearth carved out of the raw clay outcrop, offers a stage for the conjunctions of earth, fire and water.

As Jeju’s scora is deposited on the freshly cut clay hearth, I find my paced actions turning into a sequence of pseudo-ceremonial gestures. The clay removed from the hearth is my base material to which scora is added and subsequently invested into the reclaimed moulds. The saturated state of the moulds make it impossible for these to function as an effective tool for reproduction, so they are appropriated as crucibles in an attempt to ‘smelt’ the scora mix. The futility of these actions leads to the scora mix being applied to fired objects or the raw scora dusted onto on to the surface of the clay casts and broken shards. Yet with the absence of appropriate technologies to ‘control’ such matter, a series of futile outcomes result that embrace time-bound visceral experience rather than tangible object. The transformation of matter from liquid to solid; the boiling, blistering and shrinkage of raw clay; the act of erasure through fragmentation and concealing, opens up a more experiential and transient dialogue in response to the material endeavors of skill and regional loss. Yet this process becomes more about the ‘potentials’ of re-creation, which iterate the histories of alchemy and metamorphosis within early regional production, predicated upon the appropriation and assimilation of East Asian culture. Returned to the earth, these experimental endeavors in time may be celebrated as some impenetrable ritual act, the presence of Jeju scora posing a complex conundrum to any future historical objectivity…