Thinking Through the Past for the Future

Clay Museum Conference, British Ceramic Biennial, 2023

Clay Museum is a programme funded by Arts Council England. It is a collaboration between The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery and the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB). We are engaging secondary school students with the museum and its collections through a series of hands-on clay workshops. The workshops link the curriculum to objects in the museum. We then explore these through practical activities with clay. We want to discuss how museums, artists, and educators can work together, delivering creative workshops for young people. This all-day event will bring together artists, museum staff, and educators to talk about how we can get young people excited to learn. Natalie Armitage, the Learning & Participation Manager for British Ceramics Biennial and the BCB Co-ordinator for the Clay Museum, will facilitate the day alongside Lisa Joyce, the lead for Clay Museum at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery and Amanda McDonagh, the Education Officer for The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. The conference addresses the following questions:

How do you engage young people with museum collections?

What goes into designing a programme that combines exciting hands-on clay activity with history, science and local stories?

How do you create cross-curricular links that will get schools interested in participating?

Keynote Speaker
Neil Brownsword, Professor of Ceramics at Staffordshire University, Thinking Through the Past for the Future

Responding to and remediating the museum archives and collections has been central to Brownsword's artistic practice over the last 3 decades. Perceptions of the museum with its colonial tendencies, connoisseurly top-down accounts of history and tendency to fix interpretation, is something he has continued to challenge. By seeking alternative narratives beyond authorised heritage discourse, Brownsword re-connects and re-engage audiences with object histories using collaborations with living heritage, novel digital technology and through the language of making. This presentation focuses upon numerous case studies that explore methods of creative practice that engage object histories, including Design Lab Nation, a project in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in 2018.

Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher, educator and Professor of Ceramics at Staffordshire University. Brownsword’s artistic practice examines the manufacturing histories of North Staffordshire’s ceramic industry, and the effects globalisation has had upon people, place and traditional skills in recent decades. His reactivation of associated post-industrial spaces and endangered industrial crafts has achieved impact internationally via cross-cultural exchange, and curated trans-disciplinary collaborative projects. Brownsword’s work is represented in public collections internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Korea Ceramic Foundation and Yingee Ceramic Museum Taiwan. In 2009 he was awarded the ‘One Off Award’ at the inaugural British Ceramic Biennial, and the Grand Prize at the 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, South Korea, in recognition for his ‘creativity and contribution to the field’. In 2019 he was awarded the inaugural Whitegold International Ceramics Prize.

Guest Speaker – Aysha Afridi, Senior Manager- Museums (Collections Development) at Arts Council England

Aysha has worked across the Midlands for the past 17 years, leading a range of programmes to support engagement with arts, culture and heritage. Aysha is the Senior Manager- Museums (Collections Development) at Arts Council England, and is responsible for the development of national policy related to collections within museums, leading work around restitution and repatriation, Subject Specialist Networks and the Designation scheme. Prior to this, Aysha was Director of Cultural Engagement and Head of Research and Cultural Collections at the University of Birmingham. Aysha was responsible for overseeing the University’s diverse collections of art, antiquities and objects and supporting public engagement across campus.