It is a great honour to be here in Melbourne. It is also an occasion for anxiety. I have been thinking and writing about the crafts for a good many years now and the challenge is to go on thinking creatively and, I hope, usefully. Whether I succeed on this occasion is for you to judge. But I was conscious when writing this talk that I was going to address a craft culture in Australia that has led the way in writing and criticism in our area-from Mark Pennings and Justin Clemens' 1996 book of essays Cultural Theory and Craft Practice to the recent number of Artlink devoted to the handmade.
The title of this talk is speculative, not prophetic, not to be taken literally. The Future is unlikely to be Handmade unless the worst predictions of catastrophe theorists like James Kunstler come to pass. Nonetheless, anyone who has read Kunstler's latest book The Long Emergency will have had cause to reflect on everyday life when what Kunstler calls the 'oil fiesta' is over. I think we can agree that we have reached a challenging moment in our collective global history. And craft, with its changeable, slippery identity is, as usual, a good barometer of current anxieties, hopes and confusions about modernity and our place in a world over which we apparently have little control.
So we have Kunstler in The Long Emergency writing with grim satisfaction of a future in which local food production will become a priority, in which cities like Los Angeles built on the edge of deserts, will vanish as unsustainable, in which what he deems real skills-farming, animal husbandry and joinery and carpentry-will gain status as against jobs-PR for instance -that may well disappear altogether. Kunstler envisages a distinctly artisanal craft revival. Indeed craft will become a matter of life and death. Kunstler wants to make our flesh creep when he grimly predicts that "life will get much more real. The dilettantish luxury of relativism will be forgotten in the boneyards of the future. Irony, hipness, cutting-edge coolness will seem either quaint or utterly inexplicable to people struggling to produce enough food to get through the winter.one of the few consolations of the years ahead will be to consciously craft things for reasons other than to merely shock and astonish.'
This is a species of writing with an extended history. The tens and twenties of the previous century throw up plenty of examples usually in fictional form in which catastrophic events sort out the men from the boys. For Kunstler catastrophe conveniently spells the end of a number of things that he dislikes-such as contemporary art. During the long emergency Kunstler notes with satisfaction that art will be supplanted by skilled handwork.
It is a strange experience reading Kunstler. The day after I bought his book I was in Tate Britain and was confronted by this wooden shed. I enjoyed looking at it and only slowly gathered that it was part of an extended art work in which the artist Simon Starling turned the shed into a boat, paddled it down the Rhine to the art museum at Basel and reconstituted the boat into a shed again. It forms part of Simon Starling's exhibit for the 2005 Turner Prize currently showing at Tate Britain. Like other sheds that have recently entered galleries-a beach hut bought by Tracey Emin and shed that was blown up by Cornelia Parker-I think its formal impact on the viewer is something to do with craft, with a craft nostalgia which is sweeping the art world.
I imagine that we have all noticed that craft is currently an especially resonant term. I'm sure many of you will have read the American sociologist Richard Sennett's books The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) and Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003). Sennett seizes on craft as an alternative to the endless self-reflexiveness of contemporary life. But of course self-reflexiveness, as he points out, compensates for post-industrial working practices based on here-and-now organisation and on short term contracts that work to damage individual dignity, making it harder for them to construct life stories with a sense of cumulative achievement. Skills won through long experience appear to count for nothing. Even when engaged on production (as opposed to service industries), work is often illegible to the workforce-they can neither mend the machines they use nor fully understand the processes of production. Think of the isostatic dust pressing of plates at advanced ceramics factories! As a result identities are eroded.
In any case, as Sennett argues that we live in a world that singles out comparatively few for recognition and where our work is endlessly being assessed and judged. His solution is perhaps surprising: 'The best protection I'm able to imagine against the evils of invidious comparison is the experience of the ability I've called craftwork and the reason for this is simple. Comparisons, ratings, and testings are deflected from other people into the self; one sets the critical standard internally. Craftwork certainly does not banish invidious comparison to the work of others; it does refocus a person's energies, however, in getting the act right in itself, for oneself. The craftsman can sustain his or her self-respect in an unequal world'.
Sennett, like Kustler, conceptualises craft in a fashion that might seem remote or irrelevant or even irritating to many contemporary makers. They both emphasise observable skill and long practice; when Sennett sees craft as a protection he is thinking in part of his childhood in a deprived area of Chicago when he got solace and a sense of worth from playing/practicing the cello. When Kunstler thinks of craft he is anticipating the demise of a consumer culture of which he disapproves. Craft, as so often, is used by both writers to foreground other concerns. The same could be said of Malcolm McCullough's Abstracting Craft: the Practiced Digital Hand (1996) where craft practice is defined as 'Skilled work applied towards practical ends'. Here, craft is invoked to humanise the world of New Media, particularly the monotonous work of programming and of confidently using 3D CAD systems like Rhino.
So far I have been discussing distinctly conservative visions of craft. These can take a directly political form: over the last century and a half craft has often been invoked when some kind of cultural call to order was underway. In Nazi Germany, in Vichy France, in Franco's Spain and among the Far Right in inter-war Britain craft in a folk or vernacular guise was seen as an antidote to the threatening internationalism of modernism. The Labour Minister's room in the Reich's ministry, Berlin (1938); Rolf Gardiner, far right landowner and organic farmer leading Morris dancers through the streets of Dorchester on Plough Monday (1938). The 1980s call to order in Mrs Thatcher's Britain was hardly comparable but craft again was seen as an antidote -a corrective to what the late Peter Fuller described as "the debased Fine Arts". Paul Caton posed in woodland with a turned bowl and Mrs Thatcher with a selection of favourite craft objects (1987).
Yet, paradoxically, by 2001 the debased art world was apparently embracing craft, through hands-on engagement with ceramics, woodworking and hand-stitching. The overheated introduction to the Saatchi Gallery's New Labour celebrated 'laborious physical involvement' and the democracy of craft 'anyone can learn these crafts'. The craft employed in Michael Raedecker's paintings. Grayson Perry's ceramics We've found the body of your child of 'baked mud' and Enrico David's 'gesturing abstract patterns with a router on MDF' were DIY and homely-evening class pottery, 'grade 9 woodworking skills' 'granny-craft stitching' 'knitting and darning'. The subject matter was far from reassuring however and part of the impact of this work was the disjunction between the medium and the message-between vases and child murder, between DIY shelving systems and home-made pornographic movies between cosy stitching and the emptiness and anomie of modern living. We might argue that in this instance craft is employed ironically. Form and context are incongruous.
Then again, in 2004 the Prince Klaus Fund in Denmark published a book of essays entitled The Future is Handmade which further underlined how slippery standards are and how contingent are our ideas about craft and the handmade. An essay by the art historian Iftikhar Dadi argues that cheap toys made in Pakistan using re-cycled plastic and hand-operated plastic moulding machines can be viewed as a species of urban craft. Fifty or even twenty years ago a plastic toy was crafts' antithesis. But these objects seem nostalgic in their crude facture-the all too visible seams and hand-painting for instance. They remind us of the homogenising effects of globalisation but at the same time of the local-of uneven development in South Asia with its trans-national corporations on one hand and its unplanned urban slums and informal networks of production on the other hand. These modest species of backstreet manufacturing also remind us of the agency of the local, of the way people keep on making, keep on being inventive, keep on keeping on.
I have to admit that the issues I have touched on so far and the images I have shown are not what drew me to the crafts in the first place. What drew me was a range of remarkable, sophisticated objects that often referred to the complex history of the decorative arts. Here are two ceramic pieces which I admired when I first became aware of the field back in the early 1980s by the late Ewen Henderson ( Upright Form 1985) and by Andrew Lord (Round Shadow Set 1976)-one referring to early ceramic history and the other to the role of ceramics in the modernist still life. But the delight that I once took in contemplating things like these has been undermined. Singular objects on plinths, complex and persuasive, should be open to something of a phenomenological approach, to a close reading. So what is the problem? Singular objects on plinths located in a white space were, long ago, the province, the marker, the sign of the art world. But this is no longer the case. Currently the various genres of fine art emphasise research, information, documentation. Installations that resemble drop-in centres or informal archives or as here assembly lines can be seen at every international exhibition. Benin artist Georges Adeagbo, African Socialism 2002). It is a strategy that can leave the craft object looking stranded in its innocent singularity.
This image helps explain what I mean. It is part of a soldier set and it represents an explosion. It is made of painted plaster composite, produced in Germany in the 1930s. It is tiny, a bizarre little thing which might be overlooked or thrown away by accident. The British sculptor Richard Wentworth included it in his remarkable exhibition entitled Thinking Aloud staged in 1998 where it became an object to wonder at. I imagine you are all familiar with Wentworth's work. He deals with everyday things-but seeks out the remarkable in the quotidian. His approach is best captured for me by a little story he tells of visiting a hardware store in order to buy a galvanized bucket. The shop-keeper wrapped it in a brown paper bag. Struck by the absurdity of this action Wentworth went back the next day and bought a second bucket and created this eloquent little piece A pair of Paper Bags 1982 in which the wrapped buckets stand on a little mat made by the artist. This piece might at first seem like a ready-made in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp. But I'd argue that it operates differently to those celebrated early twentieth century objects-the urinal, the bottle rack and so on. Put crudely, A Pair of Paper Bags is not telling us, as Duchamp did, that the artist has the power turn any object into an art object. Rather Wentworth appears to be watching what happens to objects, behaving more like an ethnographer interested in the social life of things, in their careers as it were.
Wentworth's exhibition Thinking Aloud sought to educate the eye through the poetic juxtaposition of objects. He included maps, traps, flags, artworks, toys, clothing, photographs, architectural plans, the notebooks of the idiosyncratic Belgium anthropologist Gaspard Marin (d.1969), who created bizarre taxonomies for unexpected classes of objects -fences, weapons and umbrellas. Thinking Aloud was a single artwork in the form of hundreds of distributed objects. They spoke to each other and to us and the experience of the exhibition involved criss-crossing the room-from the model explosion to Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (1992) a remake of the Underground map, to a BBC shipping forecast chart to Cornelia Parker's Dynamite (in anticipation of an explosion) to a pair of camouflaged snipers gloves. In the light of recent events, that so much of the exhibition looked at the banalities of the apparatus of war suggests something that I think we all know-that artists go ahead of us, pointing out our future concerns with disturbing accuracy.
Thinking Aloud was an exhibition of objects consumed by Wentworth. I am not saying that literally all of the things in the show belonged to him, although some of them appear to have been his. But he operated more as a consumer and an archivist and a creator of taxonomies than as a traditional artist. He consumed to create. In most of his art he abandons the studio for the streets and for the performance of tasks unrelated to the traditional genres of art. Instead of the studio-based activities associated with, say, painting, he makes buying a bucket or visiting a flea market or looking in a skip central activities. He belongs to what I have come to see as a consumption paradigm in the visual arts.
But of course, despite my reservations about the one-off pot on its plinth, it would be wrong to think that that is where the craft object remains stranded-in the white cube of yesterday-year. That is only part of craft life-they, like more quotidian objects, have social lives. Because craft objects are more likely to find a home in a domestic setting than art works their after-lives are unpredictable, more subject to the vagaries of taste. Therefore they might have a multiplicity of roles in what I have come to call the consumption paradigm in the visual arts-they might quote existing objects or be co-opted into the creation of new art or design. And in the context of this consumption paradigm -it seems most useful to discuss art, design and craft in tandem. All are affected by the situation facing us here and in North America and Europe.
To summarise crudely: today more of us are consumers than producers. Currently, production is fast becoming something that happens elsewhere-particularly in China, as any visit to Wallmart will make clear. Communication between designer and manufacturer is now taking place over continents electronically. There is little thought of educating consumers in the standards of so-called good design. Rather, design is consumer-led. And it often emphasised that we are creative consumers, not the dupes of Vance Packard's doom-saying classic The Hidden Persuaders .
Artists, designers and craftspeople are consumers too -thus we encounter plenty of work where they operates as consumers in order to produce -finding and adapting stuff with a narrative charge. Linked to this is a loss of interest in the kind of originality previously central to the idea of progressive art and design. Copying, remaking, reconstituting, replicating now seems central to the visual arts and to other areas like popular music -where the new heroes are not musicians but D.J.s who mix and collage existing material.
This in turn relates to an existential problem -why design or make art or craft at all in such a full world? Sometimes it seems that existing objects have taken over -and have a life of their own. And craft in particular can no longer set itself up as the antithesis of soulless mass production * as perhaps it could up until the 1960s and 1970s. Here in the first world we now have unprecedented variety and choice in consumer goods. Soon, we are told, we will able to customise products individually as owners of computer aided making prototyping and milling machines.
For example what about these curious vases and lights? These were seen a few years ago at the furniture designer Ron Arad's retrospective at the V&A. They are made using fusion deposition modelling in which a drawing on a computer screen is translated into an actual object. Fusion deposition modelling and stereo lithography are used as a matter of course in industry for rapid prototyping but here Arad has employed the process poetically to create objects which he describes under the rubric "Not made by hand, not made in China". They suggests a new blurring of the categories art, craft and design.
To return to my original list of new concerns with some examples -First: artists finding and adapting -making art through intelligent consumption. Stuff, things can be used light heartedly or seriously. I never know how seriously to take Tord Boontje's Rough and Ready Furniture made out of what the designer refers to as "available materials"-wooden struts, blankets and plastic sheet. Perhaps this was what the distinguished designer and theorist David Pye meant when described most design as "a lash-up". A similar, if less extreme, interest in available materials transmuted is found in the work of Michael Marriott whose XL1 chair was originally made from recyled tea-chests. Now his work is produced in quantity by a manufacturer but its craft origins and its adapted materials are what gives it its distinctive visual presence. I just suggested that the formal beauties of studio ceramics currently appear challenged. Carol McNicoll's work-cast from existing objects found in thrift shops-makes its strength from its very impurity of form-collaging two images of Englishness, a souvenir plough horse and an industrial teapot and then confusing us by covering both with decals of vine leaves. But quoting and reproducing can take a different more practical form. This is another example of slipcasting designed by the Anglo-Indian design team Doshi Levien. It is based on a traditional Indian matio that cools water because of its porosity. This version includes a water filter and is proposed as alternative to refrigerated water. It is pictured here with a plastic kettle of the kind used for ritual washing in Muslim communities. The ensemble has a visual resonance for anyone from the India sub-continent.
Adapted materials can convey ideas of nationhood which have a tragic dimension. Here is part of an installation by the British/Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare in which he meditates on British-ness and African-ness by creating the kind of carefully made mannequins in period costume which we would expect to find in a room setting in an old fashioned museum. Except that the costumes are made of cloth still specifically produced for the West African and Caribbean market. The stuff, the cloth is powerful, recognisable and we can read its use here in many ways.
This kind of politicised re-representation of material also characterises work by first nation artists in North America and Canada. I'm thinking in particular of the Canadian Indian Brian Junger who cuts up Nike-Air trainers, using their distinctive markings to fashion simulacra of North West Coast Aboriginal masks. Here the comment runs somewhat in reverse to the work of Shonibare. A global product is dissected and rendered poignantly regional and specific. And all over the world these kinds of semi-political interrogations of objects are taking place. Here is a work by the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. He takes a Han vase-the kind of object eagerly acquired by early modern collectors in the West and which inspired early studio potters -and he defaces it with a Coca Cola logo. It is a condensed, powerful addition to the Orientalist debate in the form of an object.
All visual disciplines are choosing to copy, to replicate images and objects or represent them in this full world of ours. Ann Hunt painstakingly embroiders images based on photographs of iconic early modern buildings -here is Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam. The results are unsettling -the medium and the image would one think be in opposition -but the result is unexpected integral and satifying. Other examples of replication play with iconic design. There is Neil Cummings' recreation of the famous chair by Gerrit Rietveld rendered non functional and unstable by being carefully made in veneer and cardboard. There is the Canadian Gordon Peteran's Prosthetic Device in which a dilapidated Shaker style chair is held together by a brass brace that also created a serviceable perch-like seat. Here Tracey Rowledge's gold tooled binding for an early edition of James Joyce's Ulysses -the intense network of lines reproduce a ball point scribble on a piece of card which Rowledge found in the streets near her studio. Rowledge likes to take the most forlorn, casually abandoned scraps of paper -examples of what she calls "a poignant moment in time", and transmutes and reprocesses this materiel with high skill into permanence. The sculptor Rachael Whiteread is attentive to existing objects in a slightly different way -it is absence, not-thereness which interests her and she goes to great lengths to cast negative spaces -the inside of a house, a room, a bath -in a variety of materials here her Orange bath of 1996 cast in rubber and polysterene. No process could I think convey more clearly an iconography of memory and of loss. As you can see, much of this work is very much about process, about procedures for making art in difficult times, art in a full world.
At times with this kind of work we seem to be in the realm of ecologically responsible re-cycling but usually this turns out to be more of a poetic than ecologically sound response to our full world. Take the Kebab standard light made by the partnership Committee(Harry Richardson and Claire Page) made by skewering a carefully chosen selection of objects (some of them craft objects like that green stripy teapot made in Gmunden, Austria) onto a metal pole. For the current British Council show in Lisbon- My World: the new subjectivity in design Committee have created a wallpaper by photographing discarded objects from the streets surrounding their studio and then drawing them and configuring them into a pattern on their computer. This thought of Claire and Henry playing with this imagery on their computer leads us to reflect on the impact of new media on our visual world.
The new technology is/has changed all our lives. Soon all information will be stored digitally-texts, still images, moving images, sound and spatial constructions. Soon these slides will be un-showable as projectors are phased out. Certain basic ideas to do with the idea of a unique object are going to be undermined by this process. For instance, the photograph is no longer special, not longer able to claim a form of mechanised truthfulness. Photographs are now just one aspect of computer graphics, infinitely modifiable-giving rise to some elegiac writing on the old craft of film-based photography and the physical activity of dark room developing-see Martyn Jolly's article in ArtLink . Craftspeople chose to comment on the nature of New Media early on. Take Fred Baier's poetic quoting of the basic shapes that underpin Computer Aided Design programmes-known as "primitives" in this chair design.
New Media might seem to be profoundly antithetical to the world of craft. Isn't applied art, and painting and carved and constructed sculpture too for that matter, all about touch and sensitivity to real as opposed to virtual materials? That is true enough but I think that New Media has forced many artists to think deeply about the nature of creativity and issues of authorship and intentionality. Let us reflect awhile on what most of us engage with when we use New Media-it is the software-be it the ubiquitous Photoshop or the multiplicity of 3D computer aided design systems.
As Lev Manovich has observed, Photoshop in particular endorses a model of creativity/authorship as selection-we select from menus and we select in order to manipulate images that we often have appropriated. So the current interest in representing, recycling and replicating images that we have just noted is perfectly embodied in commands like cut and paste. Going beyond Photoshop the 3D software programmes are having a notable effect on the way things look. The reason that cars look slightly over scaled and curvaceous is as much as anything due to the software programmes designers are using. The same might be said of architecture. An interest in the writings of Gilles Deleuze on le pli , and in topology, and in folded pliant forms is greatly aided by powerful software-indeed, we might ask, without such software would these interests have surfaced at all? Here Horst Kiechle wrote his own rule based growth algorithm to 'grow 'spaces like this interior of a gallery in Sidney, Australia of 1996. Of course there is already a back-lash against the soft but powerful control of the software. For instance in graphic design there are designers returning to craft based techniques or refusing to use them in the first place -Derek Birdsall's layout for the Thames & Hudson World of Art series in 2002 -just as there are musicians like the White Stripes who refuse to use digital equipment.
Within the craft world we find all kinds of playful experiments-such as pushing Computer Numeric Controlled machines to make mistakes and celebrating the constant slippage between the perfection of the file and the translation into production, when the algorithm meets the material. There is a counter cultural aspect to these interventions. Currently images scanned in and printed out on transfer paper in monochrome on a laser printer, can be sprayed with polyurethane to make ad hoc decals/transfers for ceramic surface decoration-because of the serendipitous discovery that the toner in the printer contains iron. ceramics with pixelated decoration by Rosa Nyguyen. Soon it won't be possible because the chemical maker-up of the toner in laser printers is set to change. Some of this digital playfulness comments on the dullness of commercial design-the Furniture as Software series created by digital artist Danny Brown for the British Council show in Lisbon teasingly comments on the uniformity of tableware by projecting digital images that alter randomly onto crockery. But that very uniformity is itself the result of an unimaginative use of CAD by the tableware industry.
But alongside play with New Media there is its serious commercial application-one that makes possible a global economy in which goods are manufactured wherever labour is cheapest. In our cosy world of cultural studies-the discipline that dominates design history -there is a marked tendency to overlook the nitty gritty of production in favour of consumption. A pioneer text in cultural studies/design history is the Open University text The Story of the Sony Walkman (1997) written jointly by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda James, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus. It is a classic text. It teaches us to look at what is called "the circuit of culture"-representation, identity, production and consumption-the overlapping elements that allow us to do a cultural study of an object. The term production sounds relevant but in fact the emphasis is on the ways in which the Sony Walkman is produced culturally rather than technically or physically-how consumer-led design processes encode meanings in objects and how consumers creatively consume the product.
In this densely written study there is the briefest mention of the making/manufacturing sense of production-in an allusion to the "women assemblers in their rows in Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan working away putting components together". Without them, we are told, "the Walkman would not have appeared and would not continue to be manufactured in such large numbers". The air of embarrassment is palpable-it is the one foolish-sounding paragraph in the whole book and it is illustrated by a small photograph of a brightly lit assembly line with hundreds of dark haired women working away-somewhere, elsewhere-far from our gaze and understanding.
But if cultural studies are still concentrating on consumption there are designers and craftspeople making work that sets out to comment on globalisation and its effects on production. I want to end by looking at two different responses to this overlooked matter of production by a designer and a studio potter-both in effect comment on production and its history and future in Europe.
First I'm going to look at the work of a young Dutch designer Peter Traag. His work is varied but notably technically engaged to the point of seeming craft oriented-though not in the way that would be acknowledged by craft furniture makers. This is one of his chairs-a chair found on a skip and dipped in liquid rubber-giving a designer skin to a discarded chair-a species of non- or anti-design that he makes in short runs in collaboration with a small West of England firm called Precision Dippings. All these chairs are of course different and take 15 minutes to make. This is another self production piece-his 130% chair made by pouring foaming polyurethane into the chair's upholstery supported in a PVC mould hung over the seat of a cheap stacking chair. Each chair is different as the upholstery, cut to over-size, crinkles within the mould. It takes 45 minutes to make a chair but the operation is distinctly low tech. It is also a comment on normative perfection-usually furniture with made with foamed upholstery is rejected if there is the slightest crinkle. Traag feels strongly about making locally-either in his workshop and certainly not further afield than Italy where his Mummy chairs-cheap bentwood chairs wrapped over foam are produced by the firm Erme. His fondness for local links up with his boredom with computer aided design. He wants his practice to engage directly with process and materials. Nothing could be more hands on that his tablemade of sheet metal steel. Here is a computer drawing but it simply used to indicate the shape in which the steel sheet should be cut and where lines should be perforated. The table is then folded into shape like cardboard along the perforated lines. The result is remarkably strong. His latest design made for the British Council My World show currently at the 5 th Lisbon Design Biennale is similarly imaginative in its facture. The LTD sofa and chair is homemade-or studio made. The seat is vacuum formed but out of unusual materials-layers of cloth impregnated with polyurethane rubber-and rests on a steel frame. The homemadeness is manifest in these images and also plays with the fact that material extraneous to vacuum forming or casting is usually trimmed away. In this instance it is left -the effect is of a draped blanket draped. There are ways in which we might criticise Traag's work, chiefly I think because of his use of non-biodegradable materials. But he is one of the most involved and hands-one designers around just now, a craftsman who is not obviously a member of the craft furniture world.
Neil Brownsword, on the other hand, is a maker, a studio potter. We have to expand our vocabulary to understand his work. His early career is of interest. He entered the Wedgwood factory as a boy of 16 on a traineeship that lasted two years. Subsequently he attended art school but his industrial training made a deep impression. Brownsword's work engages with the language of a fast vanishing culture-the production of ceramics under industrial conditions in North Staffordshire, England. The ceramics industry in Britain has undergone devastating change particularly during the past few years as formerly great firms like Royal Doulton and Wedgwood (now Waterford Wedgwood) have relocated production to Indonesia and China. Brownsword is familiar with all the specialised jobs in the industry -ornamenters, figure makers and pâte-sur-pâte decorators. He talks of the detritus or industrial waste known as schraff that lies just below the surface in all six Pottery Towns. He is interested in processes like turning and casting and in industrial tools and equipment-tile presses, print beds, saggars and kiln props. In a great factory like Wedgwood perfection is demanded of the final product. 'I will make machines out of men' wrote Josiah Wedgwood. Brownsword has chosen to honour the descendants of Wedgwood's workforce by seeking out signs not of perfection but of human touch. These are to be found among marginal discarded things: the props and spurs that are made to support objects in the kiln, the strips of clay left after turning, the rejected wares thrown into the scrap trucks impressed with fingerprints. What you see here is a small part of Salvage Series. This group of modest, mysterious objects can be appreciated for their fugitive beauty. Most recently he has been filming at the Wedgwood factory at Barlaston recording the lives and extraordinary hand-making skills of the last generation of men and women working on Wedgwood's 'prestige' wares here a pate sur pate decorator at work. We are all aware that in the future very little industrial pottery will be made in Europe. A whole culture will vanish. Brownsword's work is a poetic tribute to that culture.
