National Treasure.
National Treasure is a multimedia installation that involved the hire of a former china painter (2014-2019) and subversion of his craft to explore concepts of skill displacement following decades of industrial change in North Staffordshire’s ceramic sector. It re-mediates site-specific interventions tested during the British Ceramics Biennial (27/09 - 10/11/2013) into a multi-component work comprising of a looped video projection (15.49 mins, 2014), workstation, residues of china painting, repainted platters. It has been activated by the painter through performances nationally and internationally.
National Treasure has attained significant global reach. A panel of international judges ‘unanimously’ awarded National Treasure the Grand Prize at the 8th Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale (one of 2629 entries). It has become a reference work for noted craft scholars (including Vieteberg) to discuss ceramics’ post-industrial situation and new paradigms within ceramic practice.
- Submitting institution
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Staffordshire University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Lists 47
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Icheon World Ceramic Centre, Korea; Ann Linnemann Gallery, Denmark; British Ceramics Biennial, Stoke-on-Trent; Rörstrand and RIAN Design Museum, Sweden; Royal Worcester Museum; International Academy of Ceramics, Dublin; Korea Ceramic Foundation, Korea
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- -
- Year of production
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- National Treasure examines the ceramic industry’s commodification of authenticity and provenance through standardised spectacles of heritage tourism, which remain decontextualised from globalisation’s recent impact on traditional production in North Staffordshire. Its parody of the ‘artisan on display’ explores how factory tours that advertise indigenous skill and promote the cachet of the handmade obscure the realities of profit-first strategies of mass-automation and outsourced labour.
National Treasure’s filmic component appropriates documentary methods of ethnofiction (Anderson and Fournier, 1965) to convey re-enactments of china painting in the derelict Spode factory by one of its former artisans. Improvised single shot frames oscillate between the passive and confrontational, where the mesmerising pace and nuances of hand painting deviate from the visitor centre experience to performances staged in a post-industrial context. Here the protagonist, separated behind glass as ‘exhibit’, is instructed by Brownsword to substitute his familiar means of commercial decoration with monochromatic facsimiles symbolic of Stoke-on-Trent’s post-industrial fallout. Painted on the backs of platters found discarded at Spode, these renditions counter traditional picturesque decay prevalent in 18thC British ceramics to offer new perspectives regarding social realism within contemporary ceramic practice.
Installed in variety of cultural institutions, National Treasure has been activated with live demonstrations by the artisan. However, the work’s post-industrial specificity subverts the consumption of skilled actions to remind the viewer that such performances are far removed from the realities of regional industrial change. Drawing upon the intermediality of Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave Archive (2001), the interconnectivity of National Treasure’s multiple components amplifies notions of the ‘presence of absence’ to address cultural amnesia surrounding the value of these endangered industrial practices. Brownsword’s convergence of the dynamics of hired labour, performance, installation, social practice and filmed re-enactment brings ‘the traditions of the [ceramic] field into a new category of experience’ (Ruhwald, 2015).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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