Taskscape, exhibited in European Ceramic Context 2024, Bornholm, Denmark

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European Ceramic Context (ECC) is a triennial exhibition that has been established since 2006. ECC2024 OPEN CALL invites makers, artists, crafts practitioners, ceramicists, etc., to apply where sustainable practices are essential. In two large exhibitions, we aim to show new and significant works, projects and installations that provide an overview of the experimental, innovative, sustainable trends in contemporary European ceramics. It poses the question: 'How can ceramic makers, designers and artists adapt to more sustainable practices?'

The earth’s challenges are our challenges. European Ceramic Context 2024 is devoted to sustainable practices in contemporary ceramics. Humanity's pervasive intervention in the planet's ecosystem is now all too evident in the global environment. There is an urgent need for change in our way of looking at the world, where an overuse of the planet's resources has led to irreparable biodiversity loss, imbalance, and a severe climate crisis. Everyone is accountable for the problems. Within our field, we must be part of the solution and create a future of sustainable ceramic practices and circular thinking.

Selected work: Taskscape (looped film, 30.30mins), Neil Brownsword, UK.

Taskscape’ considers numerous paradoxes as regards sustainability, focussing upon ‘Clay Country’, the centre for china clay or ‘kaolin’ extraction in the Southwest of England. Although ecologically detrimental, this industry has sustained the economy of a community for over 270 years. However, globalisation has led to regional labour today being reduced to 14% following outsourced production to emerging economies such as Brazil.

The principles of kaolin extraction and refining have changed little since William Cookworthy discovered its source at Tregonning Hill, Cornwall in 1746. Traditional wet-mining methods harnessed the forces of erosion and gravity to ‘win’ the clay by diverting natural water courses over kaolinized granite dug manually from hillside sites. Today explosives, high pressure water cannon and technologies that involve systems of dry mining have greatly increased access to kaolin reserves to improve maximum yield. The arduous labour once performed by teams of workers with picks and shovels has been substituted by the likes of dump-trucks, bulldozers, jaw crushers and belt conveyors. With the advances of automated technology, bodily engagements with this landscape are nowadays reduced largely to sedentary contact with vehicles, keyboards and tele-remote systems that control and transform Clay Country’s industrial topography. These performative landscapes, coined as ‘taskscapes’ by the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, remain an active assemblage of human and material actions that intertwine in a constant state of flux.

Using film, Brownsword capture’s moments of interconnected material transformation coordinated by such human ingenuity. The by-products of kaolin - effervescent matter, incidental accretions, turquoise waters associated with methods of extracting, separating and settling, are framed as liminal spaces as the raw material fluctuates between solid and fluid states. Through these temporal dimension’s, forms and patterns of interaction habitually repeat themselves and add to the ‘sediment’ of generational practices and lived experiences enmeshed in the landscape.

Bio.
For nearly two decades my practice has expanded an understanding of ceramics through performative, transient and site-specific strategies that embrace and remediate its physical materiality, socio-economic histories, and intangible cultural heritage. Through the recovery and analysis of past material culture via archives, obsolete technologies and living testimony, the work raises questions surrounding the value and relevance of transgenerational know-how cultivated by instruction, and how this can be regenerated into new modes of expression. Repositioning marginalized histories in the present acts as a force for social reconnection without fixating on loss or the impossibility of returning to the past. It considers the unrealized potentials of the past in support for building the future.