Notes from an Exhibition.

So anyway, I did a minor exhibition the other week. No biggy.

I've not actually "produced" anything this year, and it feels good. Basically my room of the exhibition was just the pots I "aquired" from the old Weatherby's factory in Hanley.

Visually, I like it. It's minimal, without the architectural quality of minimalism. And cliché as it sounds I love found objects.
I'm bored of the "theme" though, I have long since ceased to care about local history, but that's pretty irrelevant now. I'm going to focus on the objects now, and hopefully go to Weatherby's again.
I have two weeks left. Oh shit.

Spode Works

Continuing my "action research" into the potteries and so on, I went to the old Spode factory. A man named Alan showed us round, he said that we were the last people to be allowed in because the council are in the process of buying it.


It is quite sad that the factory has just been left to ruin, outside we walked around the bits where tourists used to go and it seemed so lonely.



The main reason I wanted to go was to try and pick up some discarded pots for my work

There were a lot, but mostly unglazed or unfinished. The most interesting thing we found were the designs and lithograph transfers used to decorate the pots. I now have over 100 different designs from throughout the history of Spode. It's quite an amazing find.

I just need to work out what to do with it...

The Death of Pottery.

I've always hated ceramics, let's start there. Clay doesn't agree with me, when we had to do it on my foundation course the tutor told me my hands were too warm, which is why my clay stuff always fell apart. I don't really like doing things with my hands anyway (apart from drawing/painting). But I like the idea.

Recently I've entered an "old crap" phase. It started with charity shops, like all good art fags I always go in charity shops to look for AWESOME CLOTHES. But lately I've become interested in bric-a-brac. The other day I was walking through Stoke with someone and, glancing into a charity shop window, exclaimed "oh, look at that plate!". I think part of it is having my own place (university accommodation hovel) which makes me infinitely fascinated with interior decoration. Basically I'm turning into my mum. Joy.

Anyway, back to my art project, as you avid readers will know I was interested in the old royal doulton factory and this lead me to think about the decline of the pottery industry in these parts. It's weird to think that the main industry could be something so creative, wheras where I'm from it was all about cotton.

I'm in the early stages but here are some photos of my first idea of how to represent "the death of pottery". Of course, as my lecturer pointed out today, it's not really dead, it just moved to China.
Anyway:





Awesome. I love blood dripping from stuff, from an aesthetic point of view anyway. I had a phase of drawing and painting everyone with nosebleeds.

I don't really know where this is going, right now I'm toying with the idea of printing stuff onto plates, to sort of tie up all the loose ends of this project so far. But I've yet to have a tutorial about last semester's work. I'm not optimistic. I stayed in bed a lot last year. But this year I'm determined to work. And to be less socially introverted...