Obsolescence and Renewal

Since its inception KEEP IN TOUCH Symposium has hosted many esteemed ceramic artists and educators. It aims to propagate contemporary strategies of artistic expression and manufacture. Craft in all its guises is at the centre of attention during this symposium, while artistic research methodologies are discussed atop each year’s theme. The 2024 theme “Only treasures left to last” takes on what we absorb and pass on, both materially and experientially, incl. inputs driven by non-human actors with attributable agency (such as ceramic materials and techniques, specific forms …) etc. The environment we therefore wish to foster at the symposium is one of speculation, recognition and surprise.

Seeking to nurture and understand our individual capacity to think through material, we will focus on the many processes, from the most practical to the abstract. Memory, experience, stories and emotions will be shown as collective in nature, influencing our decision making. Meanwhile, the material manifests a discrete agency of its own, guiding and surprising us. From the confluence we reclaim treasures. Do we dare to reframe our understanding of interactions within the network of things, acts and circumstances as play? This year’s symposium will examine what we take in and pass on through our artistic practice with porcelain as our framework.

Neil Brownsword presented a lecture 'Obsolescence and Renewal' and experimental mould making workshop for the symposium.

Abstract
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 marginalised histories, and 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.

Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher and educator who is Professor of Ceramics at Staffordshire University. His reactivation of associated post-industrial spaces and endangered industrial crafts has achieved impact internationally via cross-cultural exchange, and curated transdisciplinary collaborative projects. From 2012 – 2020 he initiated and co-led Topographies of the Obsolete with University of Bergen, which has engaged 97 participants from 13 countries with the former Spode factory and Stoke-on-Trent’s broader post-industrial landscape. His work is represented in public/private collections internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Korea Ceramic Foundation, Yingge Ceramics Museum Taiwan, and FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum China. In 2009 he was awarded the ‘One Off Award’ at the inaugural British Ceramics Biennial, and the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale, South Korea in 2015. He was awarded the Whitegold International Ceramic Prize in 2019.