Obsolescence and Renewal (second edition)

The Crafts Study Centre is honoured to host the second iteration of Neil
Brownsword’s Obsolescence and Renewal, an examination of the marginalised
histories associated with North Staffordshire’s ceramic industry in its pre- or
proto-industrial moment in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a time when
competing workshops in the region were trying to emulate highly fashionable
Chinese porcelain and other valuable ceramics. In revisiting these histories,
Brownsword seeks not only to celebrate the ingenuity of fledgling ceramic
producers, but to draw attention to the details of technical innovation and
the material slippages that occur when attempting to develop one material
in imitation of another. Brownsword achieves this with digital renderings,
prototypes gone askew, tapestries of digital glitches, the display of museum
objects, and archival prints.

The timing for Brownsword’s first exhibition at the Crafts Study Centre is both
overdue, given his position as a leading ceramic researcher, educator and
practitioner, and fortuitous. Just weeks before writing this preface, Stoke-on-
Trent was named the UK’s second craft city, following Farnham which achieved
the same accolade from the World Crafts Council in 2020. The ceramic culture
of both places is often presented in oppositional terms: Stoke-on-Trent, the
industrial behemoth; Farnham, one of many English towns with a rich history
in small-scale studio pottery. Brownsword’s advocacy and preservation of
the skill within industry complicates this division and provides a basis for
thinking about what connects these different contexts of ceramic practice.
In an original essay for this publication Tanya Harrod examines the complex
relationship between studio and industrial ceramics with an especial focus
on the early days of the Crafts Study Centre in the 1970s. Anti-industrialism
was prevalent among the Centre’s founders and is reflected in many of the
founding collections, but Harrod questions these presumptions, providing
examples of rapprochement and even active collaboration with industry
among studio craftspeople, and draws an unexpected parallel between
Brownsword and Michael Cardew.

The texts following Harrod’s essay introduce Brownsword’s artistic practice
from a range of theoretical positions and offer a historic context to Newcastle-
under-Lyme’s importance contribution to early ceramic industrialisation.