In 1948, the ceramics industry in and around Stoke-on-Trent was seen as the world leader in pottery production. This hub of creative skill was home to more than 49,000 workers.

Yet, three-score decades later, just 6,000 remain. Cheaper labour rates abroad, technological advances, general mismanagement and our willingness to live in a disposable culture have brought the once booming indigenous workforce to its knees.

For ceramicist Neil Brownsword, whose exhibition Relic opens next week at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in association with Bedford Place’s Permanent Gallery, this decline in fortune carries a personal weight.

“I started working at Wedgwood in the late 1980s. This was just when technology had been introduced, so I got to see everything done by hand through the unique knowledge and skill people had,” he says.

Now, Brownsword regularly picks his way through the region’s abandoned factories in search of forgotten detritus and discarded debris for his own creative work.

“At the moment you’ll hear people saying ‘Well, we’ve got more production than there ever has been’, but you’ve only got to walk around the place and the evidence is there.

You speak to the people who worked in these places and they will tell you the truth about what has happened,” he says.

Relic – a series of works that embrace an archaeological aesthetic as much as an artistic one – sees Brownsword eulogise this bygone boom in quality production whilst offering up something of a creative response to Brighton Museum’s Willet Collection of Popular Pottery.

Boasting 2,000 pieces catalogued under 23 varying themes, the collection immortalises aspects of British history – be it military, economic, social and cultural – in pottery created between 1600-1900 and offers an insight into a time when ceramics were seen as a primary outlet for social narrative.

“People don’t really see ceramics as being confrontational – they just take it for granted as the cosy, domestic shiny object they look at on the mantelpiece. Look back on Willet’s collection and there’s an amazing amount of social and political issues adorning these objects,” says Brownsword.

“The closest we get to that nowadays is the commemorative Royal wedding stuff, and it doesn’t go any further than that. What I’ve tried to do is draw upon history as a vehicle for political commentary.”

Rather than work from the physical appearance of these objects, Brownsword’s work takes a more abstract guise in order to explore the rise, fall and human history of the ceramic industry in North Staffordshire.

By scavenging around the closed and often ruined factories that encircle the Six Towns, he collects redundant material left by potters and transforms it into something else, creating a new fragment or relic which only hints at a former shape and purpose.

“I’ll use things that have been left over in the factory like unfired scraps of clay or remnants of the history of production. Even the boxes that people moved objects around in are very specific to the ceramic industry, so I’ll paint them, coat them with clay then burn the boxes away, so it leaves a ghost of the box,” he explains.

“By over-firing pieces, I alter them and transform them into something else. These things have been left behind, so there’s no value attached to them. Regenerating them and putting them back out there gives them a different value.”

For Brownsword, who grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, a fascination with clay came with the territory.

“Most of my family worked in the ceramics industry, so I suppose it is inevitable there would be an osmosis effect.

It filters down – if a person works day in, day out in factories, the terminology abounds around the household,” he says.

“My grandmother worked in the industry all her life. She accumulated the wares that the factories produced, so as a very small kid I can remember being exposed to all these 1930s and 40s novelty wares.

“These things were brightly coloured and attractive…but locked away in a china cabinet, so I think it was being denied access to these things that drew me to the material.”

Extolling the virtues of the medium (“When you think about what clay can do – from space shuttles and aircraft to sanitarywear, table-wear, figurines and electricity pylons – the breadth of ceramics is inexhaustible!”), one overriding message of Brownsword’s work is that ‘there is such beauty in the accidental’.

“We are conditioned to seeing wonderful objects in places like the V&A, but they are completely devoid of any evidence of human contact. The objects I collect and transform are full of it. There is evidence of the hand making it – some of the ceramic archaeology I use has traces of fingerprints from someone squeezing a piece of clay a hundred years ago,” he says.

“It’s quite important to cite that labour in some way – the whole point of industrialisation was a standardised product, so any kind of individuality was imperfection. I’ve drawn upon this to reference the identity of these anonymous people who made these wonderful objects. The scraps they leave behind I use and see a beauty in them.”

By doing this, Brownstone hopes to leave behind a lasting tribute, or at least document, the loss and change in this dwindling home-grown industry.

“I think part of the point of Relic is to expose the breadth of the human knowledge which is central to some of these objects.

When you drink out of a cup, you don’t think that it’s gone through 20 or 30 people’s hands to get to this point,” he says.

“You tend to take for granted all the hidden knowledge within those objects.

With the skill-base being displaced and factories outsourcing, we’re losing the unique knowledge these people have. When they go, it goes with them.”

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