Re-apprenticed.
Re-apprenticed is a multimedia installation with a performance component. It re-activates endangered industrial ceramic crafts via Brownsword’s apprenticeship to a senior generation of artisans whose former practices are considered unviable in contemporary industry. The skills of the china flower maker, copper plate engraver and china painter were transmitted to Brownsword. He deconstructed their craft into various intermediary states to reveal new insights into procedural and material knowledge.
Re-apprenticed comprises of installations of deconstructed bone china flowers, a taxonomy of materiality's associated with copper plate engraving and a looped film of enamel preparation (14.44 mins). The V&A and Ashmolean Museums invited Brownsword to develop live performances of Re-apprenticed. The invitations extended the work’s site-specific contexts and further investigations into an additional craft, plaster modelling. Re-apprenticed was endorsed by a consortium of funders including Arts Council England, totalling £23900.00.
- Submitting institution
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Staffordshire University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Lists 56
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- British Ceramics Biennial (BCB), Stoke-on-Trent; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Roche Court Sculpture Park and Gallery, Salisbury; Henan Museum, China; Wheal Martyn Clay Works, St Austell.
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- -
- Year of production
- 2015
- 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
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- 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
- Re-apprenticed is situated within contemporary art discourse concerning the recovery and analysis of past material culture through a reengagement with archives, obsolete technologies and living testimony (Roelstraete, Dean, Deller). Articulated in response to recent decades of deindustrialisation in North Staffordshire’s ceramic sector, it raises questions surrounding the value and contemporary relevance of intergenerational skills cultivated by instruction, exploring how they can be elicited and regenerated into new modes of expression by investigating their transmission and acquisition.
Utilising the vantage point of ‘insider’ from his former ceramic industry employment, together with methods of observation, repetition and imitation - analogous to those established in anthropology (Coy, 1989) - Brownsword undertook twelve months fieldwork examining and film archiving internalised procedures integral to the implementation of specialist craftsmanship. Systems of preparation, timing, and tool use were appropriated in their intermediary stages via film, metal and clay to expose nonchalant repetitive actions and obscure nuances of dexterity. Reactivating implicit memory through the transference of haptic and material knowledge demonstrated a mnemonic device to retrieve intimate oral histories that recount socialisation into work: insider ‘tricks of the trade’ and industrial transitions resulting from the impact of globalisation. Brownsword’s active participation as apprentice offered innovative insights beyond verbal/linguistic representation, collecting the embodied knowledge of a rapidly disappearing culture of labour. Brownsword challenged the dismissive/anti-progressive charge of nostalgia when dealing with the industrial past, demonstrating how artistic reinterpretation and representation of intangible heritage can create new synergies within, and expand understanding of, archival practice.
Research underpinning Re-apprenticed has influenced the critical perspectives of prominent scholars writing about marginalised industrial skill (Shales, ‘The Shape of Craft’, 2018). Relic, an output from the project, was acquired for the V&A’s Ceramics Collection. Relic was also curated as one of two British works in the First Central China International Ceramics Biennale (2016-17).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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