Neil Brownsword: 2023 Henry Rothschild Memorial Lecture

Henry Rothschild (1913-2009) was a leading figure in contemporary British crafts and design. The Henry Rothschild Study Centre at the Shipley Art Gallery displays over 200 ceramics from the personal collection of Henry Rothschild, founder of the Primavera gallery in London. https://henryrothschildbursary.org/henry. The annual Henry Rothschild Memorial Lecture series held in conjunction with The Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead and Northumbria University.

Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher, educator and Professor of Ceramics at Staffordshire University. His work 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 performative, transient and site-specific research has been at the forefront of ‘the expanded field’ of ceramics. Grounded in learning from his employment in the ceramic industry, his sustained body of ‘fieldwork’ has excavated and reactivated the tangible and intangible heritage of North Staffordshire to address the ongoing reverberations of historic change and lost labour in post-industrial contexts worldwide.

His nuanced understanding of immaterial heritage and his work’s capacity to articulate its value in the present has had cultural impact at local, national and international level. Raising awareness of industrial craft skill and the threat globalisation poses to them, it has shaped curatorial and artistic practice and, in turn, the decisions made by local authorities and national heritage organisations. This lecture will elucidate and contextualise a number of Brownsword’s projects to date which examine the impact of industrial change upon his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent.