Mosaic

Yesterday’s post was the first of a series on Made in England. I explained how I came to use ceramic tableware. Today I am going to look at the content and context of the material, to help to explain what the finished work is about. I’m also going to continue the discussion about the use of minimal means. More about that shortly.

I am a birdwatcher, and am interested in plants. In sixth form I persuaded the biology teacher to give me off-the-curriculum botany lessons on a Wednesday afternoon. I taught myself art history at A level too, because they didn’t do it at school. I chose my art text books from an art book club I found in the back of the Sunday Times. They didn’t have the books in the library. I tried to convince my boyfriend to go to a local history group with me in the evenings after school. He wasn’t convinced.

Local history may not be a popular enthusiasm, but it is important to me. It will be twenty four years in February since I saw a TV programme about the Italian community in the UK. They lived in Islington. So did I. They were mosaicists. How satisfying to do something related so directly to the past of their community, I thought. Continuity, community, knowledge, pride in labour, creativity. I wanted that. That was going to be the job for me.

So, when I turned over the plates for my mosaic (see Minimalism and Made in England) and saw the backstamps on them: ‘Baronial Ware’,  ‘Alma’,  ‘The Friendship of Salem’,  ‘Manhattan’,  ‘Colonial Village’,  ‘The Big Tomato Company’,  ‘Big Dog Bowl’ — the names themselves – with their references to aristocracy, battles in the Crimea,  Empire, clippers of the East India company, and also to our contemporary world with all its jostling democratic values, (but where the modernity of these new ways of thinking was still clothed in the visual system of the former hierarchical world) I felt the backstamps had the power to mainline me straight into a series of contradictory but fascinating readings. The backstamps did what contemporary art seeks to do – they woke me up to new meanings residing in something intensely familiar. These plates – objects we all live with every day – were loaded with all sorts of contradictory and fascinating cultural assumptions, which up until that point I hadn’t noticed. Contemporary art is about meaning. It attempts to expose our place in relation to pervasive ideologies of which most of us are only dimly aware. And the quest to reveal something new, true and overlooked is what distinguishes it from decoration.

Empire, victories at war, aristocracy — it might seem like a story of power, but once I started to look, I saw it wasn’t a story of power alone, but also gave a narrative of the relatively powerless, the people who worked in the potteries — or ‘potbanks’ as they are known in Stoke. There were batch numbers, and thumbprints, and tests of the brush, made by the ‘paintresses’ (as the women who work in the decorators department are called). There were marks made as the plates were placed on the cranks — the little pins that stopped them sticking to the kiln shelf as the ware is fired. There was a story of technological change ( hand painted and underglazed versus ‘dishwasher and microwave friendly). These were my first discoveries in an immensely rich seam — of which more tomorrow, but before I stop I must return to minimalism.

What would have the greatest power of suggestion, without getting in the way of the communicative power of the backstamps? A circle is a minimal form — the most and the least. Like a plate, and also a form without an end. That would be appropriate for the mosaic, I thought.

Six roundels from Made in England, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

Details of the small roundels from Made in England. Paintresses marks in panel on right.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: art & decoration > art & meaning > art & power > artist's hobbies > backstamps > Italian community & mosaic > Made in England > mosaic circles > paintress > potbanks > potteries > pottery marks > pottery mosaics > Stoke-on-Trent