Mosaic

It is after midnight and I am back from my assistant Sandra’s birthday party. In the Holloway Road, outside the University, I saw many young women queueing in the snow, their generous frames bulging from a tiny swaddling of baco-foil coloured fabric. ‘Goodness me, they must be cold!’ I thought, troublingly aware that my thoughts are becoming increasingly geriatric.

Not all the young lark about in quite that way. I had some lovely students today, including one young man who is a total beginner. He clutched a plastic bag of pottery sherds and fragments of iridescent glass. Both were still wet, having been collected the previous day from the banks of the Thames.

For centuries, the Thames has been London’s sewer. The banks are shored up with old industrial waste, some of which came from the ‘shawdruck’ (the pottery tip, full of unwanted, broken and faulty ware). I told Ondrej (who is from the Czech Republic) that he was a ‘mudlark’.

In 2010 to be a mudlark is to be a treasure-hunter, but in the nineteenth century it was far from a leisure activity. It was a job, done by society’s desperate and pitiful. Most were children, but some were widows – impoverished women with no means of support – who collected coal from the river-shore and any kind of material they could sell on to other poverty-stricken individuals. In so doing, they took their lives in their hands. The Thames was insanitary. London’s sewers ran straight into it. Nor was it unusual for these wretched individuals to have to pick their way between corpses – both human and animal.

I am embarking on a project ‘Made in England Unearthed.’ Once again, it based on the history of the ceramic industry. It uses both Thames collected ware, and fragments of ceramic found in London gardens. I would be delighted if anyone has anything they would like to contribute to the project. The artist John McLean, who together with his wife Jan, has been an inveterate mudlark, offered me his collection this week, when he phoned to tell us of the sad demise of the artist Ken Noland. Both Matt and John knew Ken, and are very sorry he is no more.

Fragments of ceramic slipware and transfer printed table ware collected by my student Ondrej.

Posted under: History, Learn, Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: John McLean > Ken Noland > Made in England Unearthed > Sandra Naxara