As the project depended on public involvement, it was essential that as many people as possible knew about it. I contacted local TV, radio and the press. I appealed for pottery fragments and invited anyone interested to get involved. I went to public events — fairs and meetings, and circulated information. I visited clubs (I even went to a Rotary Club lunch). I alerted NORSACA — the North Staffordshire African Caribbean Association, and the local Racial Equality Council. The project was made part of the coursework for second year students from the University of North Staffordshire.  I spoke and held classes at primary and secondary schools. UNITY — the Trade Union — bulletined their members alerting them to the appeal.

I needed to produce publicity material that gave a flavour of the project, but had its own visual integrity. I have worked for many years with the designer George Walker. He and Catherine Nippe came up with these postcard designs. Using typefaces from a variety of periods, they took well known Stoke words and phrases and and worked them into designs that are strikingly contemporary. We printed the cards on recycled material, and circulated them as widely as possible in Stoke and the surrounding area. They gave details of what we needed for the project, and who to contact.

Jiggers and Jolleys are mechanical potter’s wheels, with a pivoted profile tool on an arm, used to shape the clay.

Saggarmaker: A maker of saggers — fireclay containers used to protect pottery from flame and smoke marks caused by firing in a bottle oven.

Bottomknocker: a potbank worker who makes saggar bases from a lump of fireclay by knocking it into a metal ring using a wooden mallet.

Shawdruck: (or shraff tip) where the potbanks disposed of factory waste, and where crockery that had escaped being smashed when slightly imperfect might be found.

Stoke, now among the poorest cities in the UK, was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. Naturally rich in coal, water and clay, it was until recently a centre of the coal, steel and pottery industries. Michelin is also based here. All these industries have been savaged over the past twenty years, leaving the city decimated. The Tories attack on the coal industry in the eighties, the effect of their policies on the steel industry, and the pressure on the ceramic industry to shift production to the Far East has had catastrophic effects on employment. Michelin employed 9000 people in the eighties. The figure today is 1000.

During the making of Made in England, I had meetings with both the Secretary and the Assistant General Secretary of the Ceramic and Allied Trades Union (formerly CATU, now renamed UNITY – an acronym that no longer refers to ceramic – a sad but realistic reflection of the vastly reduced significance of the ceramic industry to the union’s membership). Gary Oakes, the AGS, talked about the role of UNITY in supporting members’ changing employment. They had recently helped one set up a business doing nails and hair extensions, and aided another to find employment as an embalmer, he told me.

The public knows about what happened to the miners and the steel workers — they had powerful Union representation. But workers in the ceramic industry were particularly vulnerable. Potteries tended to be family businesses, small, and not unionised. The city of Stoke-on-Trent itself is a fairly recent invention. Stoke is a federation of six towns – Stoke, Hanley, Fenton, Longton, Tunstall and Burslem, each formerly with its own town hall, and local infrastructure. This accounts for much of the city’s character – on the one hand these were genuine local communities, each with a particularity of place, but they were also parochial and not very outward looking.

These observations are relevant to Made in England. I went to Stoke, not really knowing the city. I had to find out what it was. I knew the names of the towns – they were familiar from the backstamps, but what about local people?  I wanted to involve the community in the project. As I drove in to snowy outskirts of the city, I wondered how I would do that.

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.

I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most effective if the means of expression are constrained. Strip away the excess, I advise them, and get to the heart of what you are trying to communicate. In contemporary art people might describe this as ‘minimalism’.  ‘Minimal’ doesn’t mean there isn’t much to the idea. The reverse is probably true. The act of editing generally enriches what you are doing, and makes the visual experience more concentrated.

I wanted to demonstrate this idea practically for a book I was working on. I decided to make something with ceramic tableware. I’d been lukewarm about the use of pottery in mosaic. Maybe I even had the odd outburst of anti-pottery evangelism. Mosaic made from tableware so often looks confusing, excessive and frighteningly sharp. There are varied patterns, colours, surfaces, textures and qualities of reflectivity – so many differences that the work becomes hard to read. Chaos threatens to overwhelm expression. And when mosaics made with pottery are easy to read, it is often because they conform to a well-known model  – breaking up a plate and sticking it together again, for example.  I can see the fun in doing it, but I’m not entirely convinced of the appeal of the finished product for anyone other than the maker. Of course you might argue – some do – that chaos is at the vanguard of delight. Exposure to the hitherto jarring allows us gradually to enter a new enlightened state of pleasurable coherence. The incomprehensible becomes beautiful  – like Schoenberg and twelve-tone technique. I don’t know how many Schoenbergs there are amongst us pottery-smashers, but if you are one, I apologise for my prejudice.

So a dislike of tableware in mosaic was the starting point for my experiments. I issued myself with a challenge – show people how to create something that used ceramic tableware and retained visual coherence. I wasn’t really certain it could be done.

My first problem was colour. If I wanted to employ a variety of randomly collected material – things students and friends had given me to use over the years – what would unify them? The answer seemed to lie in flipping the plates and using the backs of them. Plates may have glazes and decoration on their face, but reverse them, and they are generally white. The printed material on the back of the plates – what I thought of at the time as ‘marks’ and would now call ‘backstamps’ – was interesting, and a challenge to combine effectively. How could I get these to read – to become the content of the work? The answer, as I suggested at the opening of this blog, lay in constraint. Use minimal means.

I will expand on this theme tomorrow. In the meantime here is one roundel from the finished work in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, from the mecca of ceramic, Stoke-on-Trent.

Sonia found the turquoise glazes very alluring. She has been using this colour in a wonderful series of mosaics titled ‘Nebula Aqua’ for a San Francisco home. Each ‘nebula’ is made from mineral specimens, glass fusions, beads, shell, smalti, stone, and a wealth of materials of similar hue. Sonia’s real interest is in texture, and the reflective properties of the tesserae. The mosaics sparkle and glint as you move. Having seen them at a number of different times of day, I noticed that as the light fades, the shine from the curved glass diminishes, and the light cast by the opalescent material increases. The effect is impressively mutable. Set into black mortar, they sit on a granular rendered wall. Setting these elements is technically very difficult. The edges of the nebulae alone are masterpieces.