 Hi, I'm Neil Brownsword, Professor of Ceramics at Staffordshire University. Thank you all very much for taking time to join me today to share insights into my practice past and present. For over two decades, my work has mediated transitions within Stoke-on-Trent's ceramic manufacturing sector, following the impact of global economics in the late 1990s. It reflects upon overlooked histories of labour that draw attention to the significance of people and their practices affected by these transitions via the fluid perspectives of artistic research. To set the context of this work, it's important to give you a very brief overview of North Staffordshire's industrial history and our globalisation in recent decades has impacted upon regional ceramic manufacture. The six towns that constitute Stoke-on-Trent today have been renowned for their industrial scale pottery manufacturing since the 18th century. Alongside pioneers of the industrial revolution such as Josiah Wedwood and Spode, the Staffordshire Pottery is in the late 19th century comprised of hundreds of relatively small factories with more than 2,000 kilns firing millions of products a year. By 1938, half the workforce of Stoke-on-Trent worked in pottery factories, with employment peaking in 1948 to an estimated 79,000 people. To this day, Stoke-on-Trent continues to be affectionately known as the Pottery's, one of the few British cities with a distinctive regional identity and heritage that remains synonymous with a particular industry. Yet during the last three decades, escalating global competition has resulted in many North Staffordshire-based companies struggling to adapt or compete in both domestic and export markets. Rapid changes in lifestyle preferences together with increased global competition from East Asia forced many key factories in the 1990s to outsource high volume and low to mid-cost production to these developing economies, where energy and labour costs were a fraction compared to those in North Staffordshire. This strategy, coupled with the advances of production technology, has proved highly detrimental to a phenomenal concentration of skills and knowledge in Stoke-on-Trent to what was in 1991 a 22,000 strong workforce. From the late 1990s, these commonplace headlines together with the physical evidence of the effects of deindustrialisation prompted the beginnings of what has become an ongoing process to archive industrial transitions occurring across the six towns. This wasn't motivated by nostalgia for past glories or a fetish for ruin porn where the aestheticisation of social collapse eclipses the context of the related trauma. These images were driven by a compulsion to highlight the ensuing effects of globalisation from an insider's perspective, whose personal and social ties have been intertwined with the area's histories of ceramic manufacture. Both my maternal and paternal ancestry were employed in the North Staffordshire potteries. From an early age, a familiarity with pottery terminology was brought about from my grandmother's lifelong employment in the industry as she experienced numerous skilled and semi-skilled jobs. On the right is an image from 1859, a group of employees who had served a total of 54.5 years service with a family descendant Moses Brownsword on the left. Seated in the centre of the group is Francis Wedgwood, Josiah Wedgwood's grandson. As the industry remained a dominant employer in the late 1980s, it was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a similar path and at the age of 16 I was apprenticed at the Wedgwood factory where I trained initially as a tableware modeler. This formative period remains instrumental to my understanding of the wealth of human dexterity transmitted from generation to generation within each division of labour, something which I have continued to cite throughout my creative practice. However, my return to the Wedgwood factory some 15 years later sought a very different agenda and increased awareness of the displacement of craft practices in the ceramic industry prompted the documentation of many of these traditions as a key element of my doctoral research. Filmed during an intense period of economic restructuring in 2003, nearly 80 hours of raw footage was captured over an 8 month period providing a unique insight into the industrial tacit knowledge increasingly displaced by technology and automation. Alongside this documentation, I would also begin to salvage the cladetritis residual from each process as this ephemera made tangible many of the hidden human actions that accrued within each skill specialism. As systems of product uniformity and standardisation became the norm within industrialisation, any trace of human touch that remained in manufacture was considered an imperfection. Yet these byproducts bore within their fabric the physical imprints of the hand providing a direct connection to the repetitive skills passed down through time. Clay ternians, rejected wares and other inadvertent discard were later fired to preserve the momentary imprints of the hand. Materials rescued via this process constituted the work Salvage Series, a spatial assemblage flanked with juxtaposing film loops that documented demonstrations of high craft against the dereliction and demolition of once prevalent sites of manufacture. The work was not a glorification of an industry's distant past where lead poisoning, silicosis and the debilitating effects of poverty were endemic. It set out to elucidate the diverse knowledge and nuances of dexterity embedded in aspects of ceramic production and draws attention to its increased displacement. Exploring the physical site of production as a raw material itself was instrumental to topographies of the obsolete. A research project I initiated in partnership with the 2013 British Ceramics Biennial and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. It involved a site-specific artistic response to the former Spode factory which fell into administration in 2008 and was being repurposed via numerous cultural-add regeneration initiatives. Yet within the regeneration agenda of place there is often an undue and unseemly haste for local government and cultural organisations to circumvent associations with a messy fallout of industrial change in favour for a more managed or sanitised account of recent history. Tackling the complexities of Stoke-on-Trent's post-industrial ceramic situation has often led to an obvious charge of wallowing in decline or being complicit in a retrospective idealisation of the industrial past. Yet the core rationale for topographies was to challenge this politicised amnesia and seek out greater critical discourse to the realities of these transitions and their impact upon people, place and traditional knowledge. Throughout the period of co-leading the project a total of 97 artists and cultural commentators from 13 countries explored a variety of perspectives and practices that have engaged directly with the site's post-production infrastructure to explore a range of research trends which have examined the contemporary ruin the globalised landscape of ceramics and the artist as archaeologist. Though working with such a loaded site participants were inevitably confronted with the ethical dimensions of dealing with its post-production spaces and materials. Frequent questions surrounded the role of the artist working in a non-art space such as, do artists destroy the archaeology of a site or do they contribute another layer of production? Is the artist instrumental to the renewal of such places or merely an apocalypse tourist cashing in on social misfortune? Although many paradoxes remain the primary impact of the project was that the funding raised from the Norwegian artistic research programme saw local labour to restore and make safe previously inaccessible areas of the site for ongoing cultural use. Funding also enabled me to hire and collaborate with a small group of expatriate hand painters in the performative installation National Treasure. Companies that had survived the impact of global competition have in recent decades capitalised upon factory tourism to increase profit and these situations the reality of mass automation and outsourced production is often obscured by marketing strategies that heighten the handcrafted. Today many high-end ceramic skills that were once the flagship of renowned manufacturers are often regarded as outmoded or economically unviable to accommodate today's rapid shifts and consumer buying trends. To elevate the status of these threatened practices the primary objective of National Treasure has been to restage the performance of these at a variety of loaded locations. The work involved collaborating with senior generation China painters whose profession has gradually been displaced by the changing tide of fashion and by ceramic print technologies for mass production. Pictured here is Anthony Chalmer who has worked as a China painter since the age of 15. Serving as a series of provocations the painters were set to work in a post-industrial context amongst the wreckage and disorder of the former Spode factory. Separated behind glass as they applied their skills the viewer is confronted with a situation that evokes both admiration and discomfort as artisans are objectified as cased exhibits. Whilst in residence artisans were instructed to paint on the backs of damaged and discarded plates found on site at the Spode factory with imagery that ate 18th century ceramics romanticization of British ruins. Though portraying picture SDK was not the objective here the spaces within the foot of the plates where a painter would traditionally sign their workmanship were instead graced with images documenting the post-industrial fallout of Stoke-on-Trent. Working within their own time structures each artisan would occupy the space intermittently dissolving the hierarchical relationship between an employer and employee. Vacant but illuminated workspaces together with the residues of labour extended metaphors surrounding the presence of absence within the work. Ironically with this outsourcing of people and their skill as a raw material the ethical dimensions of this process remain paramount. Artisans were hired above their indicated rates of pay and their roles were fully credited within the work. An opportunity to perform national treasure in South Korea a country that gives status to individuals with exceptional artistic ability to preserve cultural heritage provided a prestigious platform to raise greater awareness of Stoke-on-Trent's endangered craft practices. In 2003 UNESCO implemented a convention to safeguard intangible cultural heritage 178 countries have now endorsed this convention effectively making intangible heritage part of their cultural policy but the UK is still not one of them. As technology has substituted many of the people embodied skills there remains few apprenticeships to secure the effective transfer of this knowledge for future generations. The importance of documenting several of these endangered practices became the focus of re-apprenticed a project that set out to artistically reactivate the specialist knowledge of a group of former industrial employees. To gain insights into the transmission and acquisition of these practices I apprenticed myself to three former ceramic industry artisans in 2015 who are amongst the last of a generation of master practitioners in their respective fields. The project aimed to illuminate the procedural knowledge of each craftsperson skill base such as the nuances of preparation, material and haptic knowledge, pace and timing and repetitive movement which were all made tangible through both film and object. Each skill specialism was deconstructed to arrest sequences of touch that exposed aspects of craft intelligence and ingenuity that all too frequently remain overlooked. Questioning aspects of work which the artisans often took for granted facilitated detailed insights into know-how yielding a wealth of oral history which otherwise would have lain dormant. However finding value in the active memory and knowledge of those affected by industrial change has often led to the charge of nostalgia and a pejorative sense and a eulogising of a past that's out of sync with an ever-changing world. Yet I would argue that these first-hand recollections remain essential human narratives that can enrich our scope and understanding of industrial history. Whilst it's correct to guard against false memory it's equally important that in the process we don't obliterate the kind of subjective reflection that can reveal greater insights about the past. In 2015 the Victorian Albert Museum facilitated an opportunity to develop a live performance of re-apprenticed in their Raphael cartoons gallery which holds Raphael's original tapestry designs that were made to cover the low walls of the Sistine Chapel. Against the backdrop of masterpieces of Renaissance art this space provided a perfect context for the performance of marginalised factory craft skills recoreographed to emphasise the sophistication of both material and haptic knowledge. This reassembly of collective skill formed the basis of factory performed at Icheon World Ceramic Centre in South Korea. For the exhibition, two artisans from Stoke-on-Trent, China flower maker Rita Floyd and mould maker James Adams were invited to Korea to present their former practices bringing contrasting modes of ceramic manufacture live into the gallery space. China flower making is one of the few methods of mass production that relies completely upon the dexterity of the hand. With changing fashion this industry in Stoke-on-Trent has all but disappeared with Rita Floyd being one of a handful of still practising artisans who retain this knowledge. Throughout the factory performance, Rita provided an intimate space for the audience to witness the rhythmic intricacies of touch evident within her craft. Yet passive spectatorship is immediately disrupted by a simple instruction for Rita to discard whatever she makes. In Korea I also had the opportunity to work with intangible asset Kwan-Soo Seo renowned for the continuation of many traditional forms of Korean ceramics. Through the collaboration Kwan-Soo produced a series of partially formed moon jars laden with the raw immediacy of touch. James Adams took these casually assembled components into a lesser revered mode of production, mould making instrumental to the histories of ceramic manufacturing in North Staffordshire which paradoxically introduced the eradication of human touch through modes of standardisation. The subtle collision of these very distinct traditions attempted to renegotiate a sense of value to people and practices displaced through global economics on an international platform. Artifacts involved in the mechanics of ceramic production salvaged from various redundant factories in North Staffordshire were also presented as a series of formal taxonomies to reattribute a sense of value to objects left behind following industrial change. What was interesting about these objects was that they were marked by point in time as prior to the factory's closure they were defaced and deconstructed to prevent subsequent reproduction. Historically when a factory would become insolvent design assets such as copper plates and moulds would be absorbed by takeover companies and continued into hybrid forms of production. With reference to this historic process and to expand ideas surrounding the cultural transfer of aesthetics, practices and technologies objects were remoulded by Korean master mould maker, Sinian Cho and cast with clay and subsequently decorated by Porcelain Carver, Young Jung Cho and painter Won Jong Lee. The collision of Korea's rich ceramic heritage with these fragmentary chunks of post-industrial discard created an interesting tension point between cultural notions of value and perfection inherited through procedural knowledge. For centuries China, Korea and Japan have influenced each other's ceramic histories and their subsequent trade with the West greatly influenced the development of European ceramic traditions that were to gain prominence in the 18th century. By reactivating obsolescence through non-commercialised production factory reiterated this process of cyclical exchange between East and West through an elucidation of embodied knowledge that prompted questions surrounding the hierarchy of cultural value and its uneven distribution to people, practices and places. A further iteration of factory was staged in the site orientated residency Place and Practices which are curated for the British Ceramics Biennial in 2017. It was interesting to reclaim the former Spode factory once more as a site of ceramic production as the area we reactivated had recently been sold off for eventual demolition and redevelopment. As plaster moulds revolutionised the industrialisation of ceramics in Britain in the 18th century and continued to be the tools for mass production I decided to use the fabric of the condemned building as a mould itself. The factory's former lift shaft was filled with 3,000 litres of a trueria mal slip, the very material on which the origins of the industry were founded and over the course of the biennial the porosity of the building cast a memory of that space. Prior to the exhibition the Heritage Crafts Association published the Radcliffe Red List of Endangered Crafts the first research of its kind to be conducted in the UK. It highlights important aspects of the UK's collective intangible heritage to assess the current viability of traditional crafts and to identify those which are most at risk of disappearing. Endangered practices from flint napping to Sussex drug making are listed but the industrial crafts particularly those in relation to North Staffich's ceramic production continue to be unaccounted for. This is something I'm currently collaborating on with the Heritage Crafts Association to readdress this imbalance. Yet safeguarding this intangible cultural inheritance doesn't necessarily mean relegating these practices to the dogma of past traditions. One of the aims of a research residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum was to explore ways in which traditional knowledge can be transmitted to new modes of thinking, expression and representation. Historic repositories that record and convey know-how from factory production such as pattern and shape books became a primary influence. Using examples held at the V&A and at the Wedgwood Museum I was drawn to the palimpsest quality of these manuals where fragmentary traces of visual and textural instruction were recorded with casual fluidity. Stemming from these points of reference I started to examine North Staffich's early industrialisation and the artistic and technological innovations that evolved through this period of cultural borrowing and assimilation. The need to work directly with objects from this timeline beyond curatorial handling restrictions led to late 18th and early 19th century ceramics akin to those held at the V&A being purchased via online auction websites. Nuances of casting, assembling, modelling and painting unique to ceramic production were sampled and reconfigured through both analogue and digital means. Through this lo-fi form of exploration imperfections of the digital were embraced as a method to transform instead of replicate. The slippage that occurs through the process of the copy either through limitations of tools, materials or skill which are prominent characteristics in that period of Staffich's production remain a continuous point of fascination. At the end of the residency one of the digitally manipulated patterns that derive from a historic copy of an East Asian prototype was engraved into a copper plate by former Spode master engraver Paul Holdway thus returning the immediacy of the digital back to the slow-paced tactile material interactions of handwork. In a live performance at the V&A Holdway offered a rare opportunity to experience the nuances of an industrial craft seldom practised where the intimate space of tool, action and matter were amplified through a live feed microscopic camera. Skill practices that have evolved through hundreds of years of ceramic industrialisation represent so much more than just the mastery and control of materials and processes. They have shaped the complex social bonds, networks and pride forged by collective skill which is integral to the identity of places like Stoke-on-Trent. Transmitting endangered knowledge through new contexts and ways of thinking in collaboration with the senior generation of artisans is just a small contribution to ensure that these industrial crafts continue to be practised and hopefully safeguarded as an essential part of our cultural inheritance. To conclude the presentation I wanted to discuss a multi-faceted project externalising the archive that was showcased as part of the 2019 British Ceramics Biennial at the former Spode site. Spode was one of the few ceramic manufacturers in Britain to have operated continuously for 230 years on its original site of production. Within 11 of its buildings there remains over 70,000 moulds that date from circa 1850 to 2008 when the company ceased trading. A society is currently in the process of regeneration and its buildings repurposed. Only a small percentage of this material has been recommended for retention with the remainder facing the risk of disposal. As byproducts of ceramic manufacture are rarely valued or preserved for posterity the finished ceramic artefact has always taken priority over those objects associated with labour. Yet as tools that revolutionise mass production they can illuminate the evolution of important technological and stylistic changes in design and industry that remain relatively under-researched. And having been previously trained as a model and mould maker there potentially exist trials and prototypes within this untapped archive which may never have seen the light of day since their inception. To confront the visiting public with the scale of this disposal issue working moulds from recent production that are regarded by some as not historically significant were installed in the external environment on the former Spode site's Jubilee kiln as a deliberate provocation. The majority of the passing public's immediate response was that of wanting to protect the mould from the effects of the elements thus bestowing a sense of value to them. The irony is that only 800 out of the 70,000 are currently earmarked for retention. The function of this work was to raise questions regarding what we do with such material as no one can reproduce from the mould as their intellectual property belongs to another factory. So do we just let this material go to landfill? Or are there more innovative ways to preserve and repurpose their sculptural aesthetics for instance using their potential as architectural modules? Alongside the installation a digital laboratory was set up in the Spode Museum Trust where staff from Staffordshire University made to 3D scan a core sample of moulds from circa 1850 onwards together with their physical mould store environments. The project aims to seek out further funding to support the digitisation of a much larger selection of typologies materials and technologies which can be archived for future cultural benefit and posterity. My ambition is to collide the potential of digital technologies with the intimate material and haptic knowledge of living heritage. I want to challenge notions of embalmed or static heritage and contribute a new layer of production to North Staffordshire's industrial history. As our industrial capacity and technological innovation moves at breakneck speed to facilitate more and more efficient production the value of haptic knowledge that once fashion material objects in particular ways should not be subject to the dictates of authorized heritage discourse and simply relegated to the living museum sector. As I hope I've demonstrated exploring an expanded and plural notion of heritage can open up rich and fertile territory to unravel new modes of thinking and creativity in a digital age. Thank you.