FACTORY.
FACTORY is a multimedia installation developed for the 9th Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale (GICB), South Korea, 2017, as part of the GICB’s Grand Prize awarded to Brownsword in 2015. To re-evaluate Stoke-on-Trent’s post-industrial ceramic legacy, Brownsword choreographed the ‘redundant’ skills of ex-factory artisans alongside the revered practices of Korean master potters in six performances. FACTORY’s multiple components – performance residues, taxonomies of post-production discard, two looped films – alongside further iterations of its performances, have been independently curated for national and international exhibitions.
FACTORY was endorsed by a consortium of funders to represent UK innovation in the British Council Korea’s Creative Futures 2017-18 UK/Korea Exchange; represented the UK in the 60th Faenza Prize, Italy; and was shortlisted for the inaugural BBC Women’s Hour Craft Prize. It has been disseminated in Korean, German, Swedish, and English print, in BBC programmes, and in numerous symposia, including Brownsword’s keynote to the international Ceramics and its Dimensions conference (2017).
- Submitting institution
-
Staffordshire University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Lists 46
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Icheon World Ceramic Center, Korea; British Ceramics Biennial (BCB), Stoke-on-Trent; V&A, London (tour); Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche Faenza, Italy; Ceramic Art London; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany; M2 Gallery, London; Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Sweden
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
A - The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- FACTORY extends a genre of contemporary practice involving live ceramic manufacture in the gallery by interrogating the value systems assigned to traditional industrial crafts. Aligned with relational art strategies that engage the viewer in political situations (Tiravanija, 2015) and skill transference through socially-engaged activism (Gates, 2013), FACTORY’s use of human interaction as a raw material confronts globalisation’s impact upon North Staffordshire’s intangible ceramic heritage.
Brownsword re-choreographed the indigenous ceramic practices of two ex-factory personnel from Stoke-on-Trent and four Korean artisans to question established hierarchies of cultural production, and to reassign value to people and practices displaced by global economics. To avert passive spectatorship, Brownsword disrupted the intricate rhythms of china flower making by giving instructions to discard every output, creating a linear deposit of waste as a metaphor for this marginalised craft. Objects found defaced to protect their intellectual property at former Stoke factories were re-moulded and put back into production by Korean artisans, who imparted inherited notions of perfection to these porcelain replicas of fragmentary discard. Partially formed moon jars, made with a raw immediacy of ‘touch’ by a Korean Living National Treasure, were taken into a lesser revered North Staffordshire craft - mould-making - which eradicated traces of human contact via standardised production.
Reactivating obsolescence via non-commercialised production revealed a shared language of haptic intelligences, developed through ethical modes of exchange between East and West. Performing FACTORY in Korea enabled the actors of marginalised immaterial heritage to renegotiate their value in a context where similar embodiments of knowledge are culturally protected. Its tour to BCB 2017 furthered UK/Korea cultural exchange, strengthening Stoke-on-Trent’s regeneration ambition as a global centre for ceramics. FACTORY’s foregrounding of the industrial crafts has influenced the Heritage Crafts Association’s policy for promoting North Staffordshire’s endangered intangible ceramic heritage and the beginnings of HCA’s protective action.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
