20 February - 13 March 2008




Neil Brownsword has been intensely engaged with the history of ceramic manufacture in Stoke-on-Trent for the best part of twenty years, ever since he was first apprenticed on the factory floor at the age of sixteen. He came to this subject, one might say this obsession, via his formative experience at the Josiah Wedgwood factory, learning various technical skills, before taking the decision to go to art college to study ceramics on his own terms. He needed to explore clay free of the creatively limiting division of labour at Wedgwood (something his own work would in part explore), though always grateful for the knowledge and friendships he acquired there. While he went on to study at Cardiff and the Royal College of Art, Brownsword has never left Stoke, either geographically or artistically. Since leaving the RCA in the mid 90’s, his work has been a sustained meditation on the social, cultural, historical, economic and aesthetic implications of pottery production in this once great industrial centre.

Brownsword has had the almost unique advantage of being both an insider and outsider, one whose family have worked in the pottery industry for generations, but who has also been able to artistically distance himself. He has seen the rich history and economic decline of the Six Towns from another critical perspective – one of both empathy and sharp insight. The story of Brownsword’s own creative growth has also been the story of Stoke’s accelerating dissolution; back in 1948 around 79,000 were employed in the North Staffordshire industry. By 2003 it was a mere 11,000, a staggering statistic, and a descent Brownsword has simply had to address. The sculpture that has emerged has an inevitable duality, both eulogistic and deeply questioning, an art that sees both the positive and negative aspects of the Stoke experience, the social and economic changes manifest in the fabric of clay itself.

After the darkly surreal collaged figures of the 1990’s (that showed both Brownsword’s sympathy and antipathy towards an often alienating work culture, one that offered little release for those on the production line) emerged a new body of work that began to deal closely with the complex substance of clay, making abstract assemblages of the kind of ceramic fragments he had employed in his figures. But now Brownsword was probing deeper, going beyond social critique to another kind of narrative. He was examining and utilising the archaeological landscape of a city built on a vast crust of clay shraff and kiln remnants, of the discarded by-products of manufacture. The extraneous material left on the factory floor, the various props, broken moulds, saggars and wasters have subsequently been combined into evocative ceramic collages; constructions melted and conjoined, transformed by playful manipulation, colour and pooling glazes into something highly visceral. These are objects physically and symbolically charged by association with generations of makers – redolent with memory. They explore the varied physical manifestations of clay but also the metaphorical and elegiac significance of these found fragments, given fresh meaning and potency in Brownsword’s hands. Their appearance speaks of social and economic wastage too.

In Neil Brownsword’s work there is a distinctly subversive negation of traditional craft and technical skill – a subtle response to the more difficult aspects of long labour in the Stoke potteries from an artist who also, paradoxically, has great admiration for those skills. His delicate and poetic amalgams, further fused, warped and mutated by their resubmissions to the kiln, have a strong sense of regeneration. These vestigial landscapes of meltdown and wastage are also about salvage and retrieval. They have an energy, a powerful frisson. Some of these structures, largely made through his ongoing relationship with the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark, are more ambitious and expansive. Others show a miniaturist’s skill, probing the fibre of clay on a much smaller scale. And overall, Brownsword’s constructive alchemy has a strange and fertile beauty. Rarely has the oozing, coagulating, brittle detritus of clay, re-formed and re-fired into another state of permanence, been so intelligently and eloquently expressed. Nor has the history of ceramic manufacture in one place been so elegiacally and poignantly recorded. There is no doubt that Neil Brownsword, still only in his thirties, has established himself as one of Britain’s most radical and searching ceramic artists.

David Whiting

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Galerie Besson
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