Obsolescence and Renewal, Brampton Museum, Newcastle-Under-Lyme in conjunction with the 2023 British Ceramic Biennial

Obsolescence and Renewal was developed as an exhibition for the 2023 British Ceramic Biennial (BCB) in conjunction with the Brampton Museum and Art Gallery. Through multi-component works comprising ceramic assemblages, 3D prints, tapestries, and archival prints, the project critically re-engages with marginalised histories of British ceramic manufacture, in response to Newcastle-under-Lyme’s lesser-known contributions to pre- and proto-ceramic industrialisation during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Expanding upon this, it investigates the entangled histories of imitation, value and cultural translation through the historically loaded aesthetic of chinoiserie - an ornamental style that exemplified a colonial gaze and distorted East Asian culture into decorative commodities for European elites. Drawing on contemporary discourse from postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha), material culture studies (Bennett, Edensor), the post-digital (Menkman, Betancourt) and critical craft theory (Adamson), Obsolescence and Renewals repositions chinoiserie beyond the decorative, as a politically charged site through which the legacies of colonial exploitation, cultural translation and post-industrial transformation can be re-examined.

Alongside extensive and sustained historical, archival, and collection-based analysis, Obsolescence and Renewal developed during a three-month invited research residency period in Stockholm (2022), where limited facilities implemented new strategies in exploring chinoiserie as a method of reproduction. Denied the familiar tools and materials of a ceramic studio, Brownsword began to work with 3D scan data from a group of early proto porcelains known as Pomona Wares (c.1746), from the Brampton Museum. The mesh topologies from these and other objects typical of early ceramic industrialisation (e.g. salt glazed wares c.1750, that emulated the whiteness of oriental porcelain) were interrogated to reveal the complex network of intersecting geometry which constituted the objects ‘digital skin’. A variety of planar observations of the mesh were captured and printed using a colour laser copier. Each printed image would undergo a sequence of multi-passes – superimposing new images until a palimpsestic rupture occurred, obfuscating, or obliterating original points of reference. This process of developing one material in imitation of another, aligns with the concept of skeuomorphism prevalent in ceramic history, where clays inherent plasticity allows it the advantage of mimicking the characteristics of other materials such as basketry or metal ware. Employing reiteration and error via intersections of analogue and digital processes, subverted the logic of precision and replicability that typically defines digital aesthetics. Through a conceptual deconstruction of chinoiserie, skeuomorphism served as a generative strategy for re-translation across material and temporal registers. This resulted in new forms of expression that echoed historic modes of displacement. Through this deliberate destabilisation of digital reproduction, Brownsword challenges traditional binaries between the original and the copy, the analogue and the digital, the authentic and replicated.

In extending this process, Brownsword’s purchase examples of 18th century chinoiserie via eBay enabled him to purposefully disrupt nuances of painting and print unique to early Staffordshire ceramic production. Morphic/ fragmentary images, extracted by the rotational and linear movement of objects during rudimentary scanning procedures further distorted imagery typical of Britain’s imperialist impulse to profit from the exploitation of the ‘exotic East’ via its industrial revolution. Through this process of variable replication, Brownsword embraced the deviations and errors that occur within the thresholds of image and object simulation. Scanned images were reworked, erased and superimposed upon each other, cancelling out borrowed Chinoiserie motifs, and further undermining modes of representation devoid of cultural context.

Translating elements that were themselves translations, led to further modes of replication via the digital loom, creating a series of tapestries that privileged imperfection through their amplified materialisation of the glitch. Brownsword’s ‘copies without originals’ (Baudrillard, 1981) via a deliberate use of slippage and mistranslation between materials and technologies, served as a critical framework to interrogate the processes of cultural appropriation and assimilation that has shaped the cultural identity of North Staffordshire. Obsolescence and Renewal operates in a "third space" (Bhabha) between the colonial past and contemporary critique, using hybrid strategies to expose and subvert the Eurocentric tropes embedded in chinoiserie, while critically engaging with the histories of exploitation and asymmetries of power that shaped these motifs. By fusing traditional ceramic languages with deconstructive material strategies, the research interrogates the colonial legacies embedded within chinoiserie and repositions ceramics as a critical medium of postcolonial discourse.

Obsolescence and Renewal’s engagement with historic revisionism and hauntology through its re-materialisation of historic aesthetic tropes and fractured ghosted forms, serve as a critical meditation on the entanglements of industrial, colonial, and cultural memory. From a former factory in Stoke-on-Trent that closed as a consequence of being unable to compete with high production costs and the company’s decision to manufacture their Bone China product somewhat ironically in China, Brownsword salvaged a collection of discarded rubber moulds that had been defaced to protect intellectual property and deter subsequent reproduction. Consigned to the status of waste, the poignancy of their ‘un-manufacture’ (Edensor) led to their reanimation through ‘Ghost’ (2023), with Brownsword’s remoulding and casting these objects in Bone China and putting them back into non-commercialised production. These revenant objects, positioned within the deindustrialised context of Stoke-on-Trent, where the realities of outsourcing ceramic production to east Asia are still omnipresent, critiques the ironies of the wests reliance of eastern labour by revealing the politics of labour embedded in both historic chinoiserie and its contemporary global production chains, and exposing how the aestheticization of the east was underpinned by exploitative conditions then and now. The ghost of industrial labour that resounds through the replication of these fragmentary chunks of post-industrial discard, speaking beyond their ‘use value’, and aligns with Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant matter’, where the discarded retains political agency. Using redundant industrial moulds, fragmentary chinoiserie ornamentation and reappropriated motifs, exposes the historical mechanisms through which Asian culture was commodified and translated for western consumption.

The research underpinning Obsolescence and Renewal contributes to, Glenn Adamson’s discourse on craft as a significant site of resistance and critique; an expanded discourse on post-digital materiality by demonstrating how artistic practice can excavate the unrealised potential of historic industrial artefacts, and serve as a form of ‘speculative archaeology’ (Mattern). Through a critical engagement with Chinoiserie it foregrounds the complexities of cultural hybridity and appropriation embedded in material histories through practice-led modes of enquiry. It advances discourse in craft studies, material culture and post-industrial heritage, and demonstrates how practice-led methodologies can generate new insights concerning place, identity, labour, and cultural power.

The research dimensions underpinning Obsolescence and Renewal have been presented at conferences, symposia and public talks both nationally and internationally, including a keynote presentation at the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Culture Inheritance and Innovation Pilot Zone, China. It has been disseminated through public platforms in Sweden and the Czech Republic, and via a documentary film for People’s Daily Online (a subsidiary company of the largest media platform in China) underscoring Brownsword’s efforts to foster enhanced collaboration between the West and China. It has influenced new scholarly research (Goodby) who have redressed Newcastle-Under-Lyme’s important contribution to pre-industrialisation, and in doing so raised the profile of the Brampton Museums and facilitated deeper understanding of its ceramic collections. A further iteration of Obsolescence and Renewal curated by Dr Stephen Knott for the Craft Study Centre, aimed to negate the anti-industrialism prevalent amongst the centre’s founders and evident in its collections. Brownsword’s commissioning of leading craft historian Dr Tanya Harrod for the opening essay of the exhibition catalogue, has influenced critical perspectives that reposition industrial craft heritage within broader critical cultural discourse challenging historic studio/industry binaries.

Obsolescence and Renewal was funded by a consortium of funders that include, Arts Council England (£15,000), British Ceramics Biennial (£500). Initial research for the project was undertaken via a prestigious three-month residency at IASPIS in Stockholm, following Brownsword’s nomination by Maj Sandell, director of Konsthantverkscentrum in recognition of ‘artistic excellence’ – securing funding (£9224) from the government agency of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. It was supported by museum partners including the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Spode Museum Trust and Brampton Museum and Art Gallery.