It was pouring when I reached Longport. I attempted to avoid the puddles in my leaky shoes. The Price and Kensington tea-pot factory looked inviting beside the canal, as the rain sheeted into the water. Articulated lorries sped alongside me on their way to the A500 sending up architectural wings of spray with their wheels. A burglar alarm howled on a now deserted potbank – perhaps the wind had set it off.

‘Shall we go for breakfast at Tunstall Market?’ my friend Pam suggested. ‘Good idea!’ I agreed. We settled in at the Market Grill. Behind us, a Salvation Army officer was collecting funds, dressed in full uniform and hat. At the counter a beautiful woman with a beehive hair-do was having a cup of tea. She wore a nylon apron. Maybe she worked on one of the stalls. The market was busy, and the café was thronged with young and old. Beside us an elegant matron with platinum hair and a black fur coat grasped a mug of tea with red leather gloved hands.  Her scarlet snakeskin handbag lay on the adjoining table. Pam and I decided we would have the Full English – eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes and toast.

‘Worked in a potbank, a factory or other noisy environment?’ enquired two young men at the market entrance, as I got up to look around. They were touting for business for their deafness tests. They asked twice before I understood the question.

When I returned, two locals had joined us at our table. One of them was wearing respiratory prongs in her nose. I wondered if she had emphysema. It is a hazard of a life spent in the potteries, but I felt abashed to ask. ‘Come up from London, duck?’ the chattier of the two enquired. ‘Have you just finished University?’

‘Well there’s a compliment for you!’ laughed Pam. ‘I would call that a compliment!’ she repeated, so they understood they’d got it a little wrong. Internally I felt the prong woman probably needed her sight tested. She chatted unguardedly about her friends and relatives. ‘My brother has a lovely girlfriend. He met her on the internet. She comes from Macclesfield.’ When we announced it was time to get the bus to Hanley, their faces fell. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’ I said, truthfully.

Crowds queued in the rain to get into the Potteries Museum. Over the past few days 28,000 people have been through its doors, to see the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon treasure, a haul of gold of astonishing beauty,  known as the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’. I skipped the queues, as I was there to see Geoffrey Snow, Treasurer of the Friends of the Museum. He is typical of Stoke people in a different way. Beautifully dressed, patient, intelligent and generous, he puts a lot of effort in to charitable work for the local community. He gave me several hours of his time and expertise, causing him to miss lunch. All morning he’d been hard at work on the Gift Aid desk. If the Staffordshire Hoard is to stay in Stoke – and all the locals are committed to it doing so – the Museum must raise three million pounds. Yesterday they achieved a significant target –  the first million.

When our meeting was over, we went back to the Gift Aid desk. ‘Are you all right?’ Geoffrey asked his colleague. ‘No, I am not’ she said. ‘I am hungry, and I haven’t had a break since first thing this morning’.

Geoffrey wasn’t going to get anything to eat.

‘Show us what to do, and we’ll collect the funds’ I suggested. He did, and Pam and I took our turn collecting donations to keep the Staffordshire Hoard. The generosity of the locals was mind-boggling. From pounds to pence, almost everyone seemed to have something to give. Who wouldn’t value a community like that?

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.