Culture24 editor, Richard Moss, picks his six favourite things from the British ceramics Biennial 2015

There is a lot to absorb at the British Ceramics Biennial 2015 – from major artists like Bruce McLean throwing pots and creating abstract designs on large tiles to the ceramic slot machine of Lawrence Epps and the affecting memorial to the men of the North Staffordshire Regiment killed during the First World War.

It's a chance to see new work by some familiar names and to discover some unfamiliar but exciting emerging talent in an environment steeped in the history and tradition of ceramic production in Staffordshire. Here are six highlights from a ceramics biennial showcasing the sheer breadth of talent and imagination in ceramic art today.

Sam Bakewell, Imagination Dead Imagine

Let’s begin with this strange presence – a kind of ceramic mud hut made with clay and coconut oil with the consistency of rough cake icing – sitting in the middle of the factory floor.

Its creator, Sam Bakewell, has spent some time in the studio of potter/author/traveller/clever-clogs Edmund de Waal and he certainly seems to have picked up some of De Waal’s skill for a studied ceramic intervention.

Venture inside and you will be rewarded with a series of exquisitely crafted objects imprisoned behind barred caves punched into the walls. With the aesthetic of the found object, seaside flotsam or the discarded toy, these strange objects manage to conjure thoughts that hover somewhere between beauty and the macabre.




Rhiannon Lewando – The Salient Dead

Each year new makers and ceramic artists graduate from college courses around the country, and the FRESH strand of the Biennial offers an opportunity to show their work beyond college, often for the first time.

There are 30 fresh talents to explore here and Rhiannon Lewando’s The Salient Dead takes the much-quoted TS Eliot poem, The Hollow Men, for inspiration. According to its text panel the work “explores a landscape of man made death that unifies the humanity of the hand with the metamorphosis of man into weapon.”


On first appearance it seems like a pile of archaeological finds and much like unearthed things from the past, there is a sense of mystery in their strange earthenware shapes. They have both a textile and tactile quality that recalls the Bronze Age as much as Eliot’s fragmentary world shattered by the First World War.

Neil Brownsword, Re-Apprenticed

Claiming to be as much an archaeologist as an artist, former Wedgwood apprentice model maker Neil Brownsword is fascinated by the unique form of intelligence and artistry found in the distinctive heritage crafts of the ceramic industry - like flower making, copper making, and ceramic painting.

Currently learning these crafts from three former factory artisans, there is something particularly moving about the way he has peeled back the layers to reveal the inter-generational artistry and skills of people who worked in Staffordshire’s pottery factories and the incredible body of knowledge they carry with them.

Anthropology, archaeology and art come together for this atmospheric celebration via objects, films, live demonstrations and a series evolving installations celebrating the art of the factory floor.

The Old Spode factory

One of the great triumphs of the Ceramics Biennial is the move almost wholesale into the Old Spode Factory site in the heart of the city. The place easily accommodates 150 artists who have made what BCB Artistic Director, Barney Hare Duke, describes as “an expansion into the space”. It is the perfect place to experience the latest in ceramic art.

Natural light floods in from windows above the wave like-concrete ceiling while the new ceramic forms somehow manage to be freed and yet feed off the factory’s iron window frames and the peeling paint of the stripped brick walls.

It’s a minimal space that accommodates the many onsite commissions – some of them still developing – together with a shop and café. But it also offers a chance to explore the nooks, crannies and intriguing traces of the once booming centre of ceramics production. If you have time take a walk through the historic yards out back and visit the volunteer run visitor centre seeking to preserve its history.




Caroline Tatersall, Geysers

There is something very tactile about ceramic art – even more so the clay it is fashioned from – but Caroline Tattersall’s Geysers take our connection with clay back to a primal level with a series of steaming and gurgling geysers from which the brown stuff gently bubbles.

It helps that they are fashioned from beautiful ceramic spheres, but the primordial gloop emanating from their centre reminds us where the ceramics and possibly even us, come from.

 
Ian McIntyre: Icon, The Brown Betty Teapot

When you finally pull yourself away from the magic of the old Spode Factory, this exhibition across town at Airspace Gallery, is another art-historical investigation illuminating Staffordshire’s ceramic history that is well worth seeing.

Ian McIntyre’s Icon: The Brown Betty uncovers that most British of objects, the Brown Betty teapot, made in their thousands in the kilns of Staffordshire since the 1930s and still produced locally.

McIntyre dissects this iconic object with a surprisingly forensic approach, tempered by an artist’s eye that emanates a warmth and love for often overlooked British design icon.

Tip: You can buy a Brown Betty, eight-cup teapot in the British Ceramic Biennial shop at the old Spode Factory site for a mere £14. Six, four, and two cup teapots are even cheaper.

• The UK’s largest ceramics festival, the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB), takes place in Stoke-on-Trent until November 8 2015. See www.britishceramicsbiennial.com for more details.

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