Resurrecting the Obsolete: Re-evaluating Intangible Cultural heritage in the UK Ceramic Industry

International Workshop on Recreative Practices in the Art and Humanities
15 and 16 June 2022

This intensive two-day workshop offers a much-needed forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue and inter-disciplinary experimentation in the area of recreative practices. Recreative practice – the process of re-making an object - is widespread in the arts and humanities. Frequently employed in art, photography and design as a technique for retrieving haptic and tacit forms of knowledge and lost technologies, re-makes are also present throughout contemporary art and the museum world. Yet practices vary widely not only in their very appellation – recreative practice, reproduction, experimental archaeology, remaking, replication - but also in the nature and degree of their theoretical grounding. The fields of art history and curatorship, dress, and photography are particularly well-grounded theoretically and heavily engaged with questions of replication, copying and the simulacrum. In other disciplines, scholars rely on positivist materials science, yet other fields see living traditions embodied by contemporary craftspeople as critical mediators of past practice. In both cases, there are opportunities for greater criticism of the underlying assumptions these approaches entail and engagement with theoretical developments in other fields.

Keynote Speakers
Jenny Tiramani, Costume and Stage Designer, Principal School of Historical Dress; Julian Stallabrass, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Nuria Garcia Masip, teacher and researcher in Islamic calligraphy; Dr. Michael Robinson, modern daguerreotype practitioner.

Co-hosted by the School of Fashion & Textiles and the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester (UK)

Resurrecting the Obsolete
Professor Neil Brownsword, Staffordshire University
https://recreativepractices.our.dmu.ac.uk/presentations/

The recovery and analysis of past material culture through a reengagement with archives, obsolete technologies and living testimony has pre-occupied much contemporary art in recent decades. Since 2003, Neil Brownsword’s artistic practice has explored a similar sense of historical revisionism, whereby he attempts to reveal and construct new insights into explicit knowledge associated with marginalised industrial crafts. Articulated in response to recent decades of deindustrialisation in North Staffordshire’s ceramic sector, it raises questions surrounding the value and contemporary relevance of intergenerational skills cultivated by instruction, and how these can be elicited and regenerated into new modes of expression through their transmission and acquisition.

Utilising the vantage point of ‘insider’ from his former employment in the ceramic industry, together with methods of observation, repetition and imitation - analogous to those established in anthropology (Coy 1989), Brownsword has undertaken extensive fieldwork examining and film archiving internalized procedures integral to the implementation of specialist know-how. Systems of preparation, timing, and tool use are appropriated in their intermediary stages via film and residual materials, to expose nonchalant repetitive actions and obscure nuances of dexterity. Reactivating implicit memory through the transference of haptic and material knowledge has retrieved intimate oral histories that recount socialisation into work culture, ‘insider’ tricks of the trade and industrial transitions resulting from the impact of globalisation. Brownsword’s active participation ‘as apprentice’, has offered innovative insights into the embodied knowledge of a rapidly disappearing culture of labour. His recreative practice demonstrates how artistic reinterpretation and representation of intangible heritage can create new synergies within and expand our understanding of the industrial past beyond the dismissive charge of nostalgia.

This presentation explores how traditional ceramic craft practices context bound to North Staffordshire and displaced from contemporary production, can be culturally re-evaluated beyond the economics of the factory, and perceived stasis of heritage.