Emma Biggs Mosaic

Back in November 2012, I was preparing my application for Goldsmiths MFA. It was a mammoth task to explain why on earth I wanted to do the course, and to describe my work in terms of critical discourse. I couldn't simply say "I want to be taken seriously, and I want to make full use of the workshop facilities and technicians because I can't afford to do half the things I want to do otherwise."

I got an email last week to say I'd been unsuccessful.

As part of my preparations I looked through my favourite art books. One of those books was Matthew Colling's Art Crazy Nation. It seemed rather dated (it was published in 2001) and I wondered what he had been writing about recently. Google led me to Biggs & Collings where I found the above piece by Emma Biggs.

Not being part of the art world's social network, I had no idea they operated as a couple making paintings together, or that his wife works with mosaics – particularly with found fragments.

At Emma's own website (emmabiggsmosaic.net) I came across her project Made in England. "The Made in England mosaic is a celebration of the Stoke-On-Trent ceramics industry and its history. The mosaic incorporates a range of fragments displaying back-stamps and potters marks, representing a wealth of stories and workmanship."

There is a website for Made In England which describes the project and is now an online resource about backstamps (or 'makers' marks'). Here are some extracts from the About section:

'Made in England’ is a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council. It was conceived by the artist and mosaicist Emma Biggs, but involves the skills, knowledge and generous participation of numerous individuals. It is both a historical record and a demonstration of how signs and symbols influence our understanding of familiar objects and inform how we think today. (...)

(...) Ceramic tableware, the cups, plates and saucers we use every day, is unusual in one respect – each piece bears an identifying mark which tells a story. Although people may have noticed the marks on plates, they are not generally given a second thought, unless it relates to the rarity of the piece and its financial value. Marks are designed to be overlooked, they are on the bottom of plates because the important aspect is on the top – the decoration – but there is a fascinating story to be told from looking at the overlooked, the things we simply take for granted. This project aims to do both aspects of what art should do – namely make us re-examine a familiar aspect of our lives and see it in a new way. It should also be visually compelling.

Made in England begins where industrially produced ceramic began: in the pottery towns of Stoke-on-Trent. An art work in mosaic is to be installed in the entrance to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Hanley, which houses a collection of ceramic of international importance, and receives visitors from all over the world.

The marks on the backs of plates – known in the trade as ‘backstamps’ – inadvertently convey a social history of England, and ways in which the English have seen themselves, encompassing technology, classicism, empire, nationhood and the pastoral. The name of the project is taken from these stamps. Ceramic was not marked with the country of manufacture until the nineteenth century. (...)

(...) The plates we will use will not be ones of enormous financial value – it is the fact that the art work draws our attention to a story told by everyday things, accessible and familiar to us all, that gives it its aspect of surprise.

Ultimately the aim of the project is to look at the everyday in a local, a national and an international context. The products of the ceramic industry have a particular meaning to the community of Stoke-on-Trent, thousands of whom have spent their entire working lives in the industry, and many of whom have recently been made redundant as the industry contracts under pressure from the more competitively priced products of the Far East – particularly China.

But curiously the highly skilled workforce is not alone in being displaced by the retooled Chinese industrial giants – the traditional Chinese ceramic towns are also withering, and there are fruitful and supportive links between the two communities. The history of ceramic, more familiarly known as ‘china’, is one which cannot be seen simply in a national context: the word tells you about a trading history.

The first part of this project will be in Stoke, the second will be in the London Underground, and the third will take the project to China.

Emma also writes about the project on her blog. She describes how she came to use ready-made pottery as a mosaic material but found the decorative elements too distracting, so decided to use the maker's marks instead. "The backstamps did what contemporary art seeks to do – they woke me up to new meanings residing in something intensely familiar. These plates – objects we all live with every day – were loaded with all sorts of contradictory and fascinating cultural assumptions (...) Contemporary art is about meaning. It attempts to expose our place in relation to pervasive ideologies of which most of us are only dimly aware...the quest to reveal something new, true and overlooked is what distinguishes it from decoration."

© Emma Biggs – Six roundels from Made in England, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

"Empire, victories at war, aristocracy (...) once I started to look, I saw it wasn't a story of power alone, but also gave a narrative of the relatively powerless, the people who worked in the potteries – or 'potbanks' as they are known in Stoke. There were batch numbers, and thumbprints, and tests of the brush, made by the 'paintresses' (...) There was a story of technological change (hand painted and underglazed versus 'dishwasher and microwave friendly)."

Emma did what I have failed to do: go to Stoke and meet the people.

In this post, she talks about how Stoke is now among the poorest cities in the UK as the industries based there have been decimated. In the following post, she describes how she got the community involved.

"As the project depended on public involvement, it was essential that as many people as possible knew about it. I contacted local TV, radio and the press. I appealed for pottery fragments and invited anyone interested to get involved. I went to public events — fairs and meetings, and circulated information. I visited clubs (I even went to a Rotary Club lunch). I alerted NORSACA — the North Staffordshire African Caribbean Association, and the local Racial Equality Council. The project was made part of the coursework for second year students from the University of North Staffordshire.  I spoke and held classes at primary and secondary schools. UNITY — the Trade Union — bulletined their members alerting them to the appeal."

She publicised the project with a series of postcards designed by George Walker and Catherine Nippe, which used words and phrases particular to the ceramics industry and well known in Stoke. On the back was an invitation to contribute along with contact details.

© Emma Biggs – postcards from Made in England

My favourite detail from the main Made In England piece is this one with the paintresses' marks:

© Emma Biggs – detail from Made in England

Postcards from Stoke & China

Some new work...the first four of possibly 16 or more small roughly postcard sized canvases which when hung side by side will make up one piece like a tiled wall...

Stoke 1, China 1, Stoke 2, China 2
Oil on canvas, 180x130mm ⓒ Sue Lawes 2010

Global trade

Here are a few selective, slightly abridged or paraphrased excerpts from Tom Standage's book A History of the World in Six Glasses (mentioned in previous post), that I found illuminating (my school history education was very poor) and which sent me down the Tea and Burberry route:

"The (East India) Company's first tea imports from the East Indies arrived in 1669...It was initially a minor commodity as the company concentrated first on importing pepper, and then cheap textiles, from Asia. But opposition from Britain's domestic textile producers encouraged the company to place more emphasis on tea; there was no problem with offending domestic producers, since there were none."

A new approach to manufacturing, pioneered by Richard Arkwright in the 1770s "turned Britain into the world’s first industrialised nation". Skilled labourers and craftsmen were replaced by machines situated together in one place around a source of power such as a waterwheel or steam engine. Employees were housed nearby and use of shifts ensured maximum utilisation of expensive machinery. "Each labourer in Arkwright’s mill could do the work of fifty hand spinners, and as other aspects of textile production were automated...production soared. So cheap and abundant were British-made textiles by the end of the C18th that Britain began exporting textiles to India, devastating that country's traditional weaving trade in the process."

The workers were given tea breaks. "Tea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration when operating fast moving machines...Factory workers had to function like parts in a well-oiled machine and tea was the lubricant that kept the factories running smoothly". Tea’s healthy properties also meant the workforce could "be more densely packed in their living quarters around the factories in the industrial cities of the British Midlands without risk of disease".

"The popularity of tea also stimulated commerce by boosting the demand for crockery and bringing into being a flourishing new industry. Ownership of a fine tea service was of great importance for rich and poor alike...The most famous of the Staffordshire potters was Josiah Wedgwood, whose company produced tea services so efficiently that it could compete with Chinese porcelain, imports of which declined and eventually stopped in 1791."

"Wedgwood was a pioneer of mass production...No longer did individual craftsmen in his factories make each item from beginning to end; instead, they specialised in one aspect of production and became particularly skilled at it. Items moved in a continuous flow from one worker to the next. This division of labour enabled Wedgewood to use the most talented designers...without requiring them to be potters too." ***

"The political power of the British East India Company...was vast...The company had many friends in high places, and many of its officials simply bought their way into Parliament. Supporters of the EIC also cooperated on occasion with politicians with interests in the West Indies; the demand for West Indian sugar was driven by the consumption of tea. All this ensured that in many cases company policy became government policy."

"The EIC's fortunes revived in 1784" (after Britain's loss of the American colonies) "when the duty on tea imports to Britain was slashed, which lowered the price of legal tea, doubling the company's sales and wiping out smuggling. But the company's power was gradually curtailed amid growing concern over its enormous influence and the corrupt and self-enriching behaviour of its officials...the company's monopoly on Asian trade was removed, except for China. The company concentrated less on trade and more on the administration of its vast territories in India; after 1800 the bulk of its revenue came from the collection of Indian land taxes. In 1834 the company's monopoly on trade with China was removed too."

"The cultivation and preparation of opium in India was, conveniently, a monopoly controlled by the company, which had been quietly allowing small quantities of opium to be sold to smugglers or corrupt Chinese merchants since the 1770s...the company set about increasing the production of opium in order to use it in place of silver to buy tea. It would then, in effect, be able to grow as much currency as it needed."

"Of course, it would never do to be seen to be directly trading an illegal drug in return for tea, so the company devised an elaborate scheme to keep the opium trade at arm's length...(this was) state-sanctioned drug running on a massive scale, which created millions of addicts and blighted countless lives merely to maintain Britain's supply of tea."

An attempt by the Chinese to clamp down on the trade, resulting in the British being expelled from Canton, "caused outrage in London, where representatives of the company and other British merchants had been putting pressure on the British government to force China to open itself up to wider trade...On the pretext of defending the right to free trade, war was declared."

"...as further wars were waged...in each case Chinese defeat entailed additional concessions to the commercial aims of foreign powers. The trade in opium...was legalised, Britain took control of the Chinese customs service; imported textiles and other industrial goods undermined Chinese craftsmen. China became an arena in which Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan played out their imperialist rivalries, carving up the country and competing for political dominance."

The beginnings of the cultivation of tea in India began around the time the EIC lost its monopoly on trade with China in 1834. "Proponents of the idea argued that...British consumers would be assured of a more reliable supply...and it would provide plenty of jobs for Indian workers, a great many of whom had lost their livelihoods when the company's imports of cheap cloth from British factories wiped out India's traditional weaving industry. Furthermore...the people of India might be encouraged to consume it, which would create an enormous new market."

"...The traditional Chinese manner of producing tea was anything but industrial and had remained unchanged for hundreds of years." There were also many middle men involved in bringing the raw material from the country to the foreign traders "that brought the price paid for each pound of tea to nearly twice the original producer's selling price. An enterprise that produced its own tea in India, however, could pocket the difference...Furthermore, applying new industrial methods...(would) boost productivity, and hence profits, still further. With the cultivation of tea in India, imperialism and industrialism were to go hand in hand."

By 1851, after difficult beginnings, "a tea boom ensued as dozens of new tea companies were set up in India, though many of them failed as clueless speculators bankrolled new ventures without discrimination...production really took off when industrial methods and machinery were applied. The tea plants were arranged in regimented lines; the workers were housed in rows of huts and required to live, work, eat and sleep according to a rigid timetable. Picking the tea could not (and still cannot) be automated, but starting in the 1870s its processing could be...

The rise of India's tea industry had a devasting impact on China's tea farmers and further contributed to the instability of the country..."

"India remains the world's leading producer of tea today, and the leading consumer...(23%), followed by China (16%) and Britain (6%)."

*** And Wedgwood allegedly got the production line idea from reading Père d'Entrecolles, the French Jesuit missionary whose letters recording the processes of Chinese porcelain production were published in 1735. See my blog: January 8, 2009 - A Note on Wedgwood.

Extracts from Around The World in Six Glasses by kind permission of Tom Standage.

A note on Wedgwood

From "Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art" by Lothar Ledderose (1998)*...

...porcelain production in China was a highly systematized, sequential process...it involved a strict division of labour...The most detailed account was given by the French Jesuit missionary Père François Xavier d'Entrecolles (1664-1741)...In 1712 and 1722 he wrote two long letters on porcelain production in Jingdezhen, relying in part on information from Christian converts in the porcelain trade. The Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Halde included the two letters in his monumental and influential Description de la Chine, which was published in Paris in 1735-39 and soon translated into other languages...

It seems no accident that it was during the 17th and 18th centuries, which saw the rise of state factories in France and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England, that Europe admired China intensely and was intent on learning from it...In Europe, the invention and introduction of machines led to the substitution of mechanical operations for manual work on a large scale. Yet machines were not the only factor that brought about the industrial revolution. The organisation and control of the workforce and the techniques of division of labour were also essential.

In 1769, Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) established at Staffordshire, England, the first porcelain production in Europe to enforce factory discipline and make full use of labor. Each of his workers had to be expert in only one part of the production, which was a revolutionary concept at the time. Wedgwood derived the idea from his reading of the letters of Père d'Entrecolles.

*The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998. Published by Princetown University Press. Permission being sought.

Royal Doulton up the spout

Bad news for the potteries (and Ireland) yesterday as it was announced that Waterford Wedgwood had fallen into administration. Pity the 1,900 UK employees who work at the Barlaston pottery in Stoke-on-Trent with Staffordshire suffering below zero temperatures on the same day.

But what an amazing British dynasty the Wedgwood family is:

The Darwin — Wedgwood family was a prominent English family, descended from Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, the most notable member of which was Charles Darwin. The family contained at least ten Fellows of the Royal Society and several artists and poets. (The most notable artist is the composer Ralph Vaughn Williams.) Francis Galton is part of the third generation along with Darwin. Clarice Cliff is part of the sixth.

The family is linked to William Wedgwood Benn's family of Labour Party politicians (namely himself plus son Tony, grandson Hilary, and great-granddaughter Emily Benn) through Josiah Wedgwood's younger brother Aaron.

More on Wedgwood later...after all Doulton & Co and Wedgwood & Co are part of the Willow Pattern Story...

Christmas - A time for Dickens

The Beeb's costume drama serial Little Dorrit has just finished. Bizarrely, the penulitmate episode – in which Mr Merdle the banker and richest man in England commits suicide as it becomes apparent that he's been using new investor's money to pay out to already existing investors – was screened just as we were hearing on the news about Bernard Madoff (surely a Dickensian name for today) who has made off with $50 billion in a similarly styled fraudulent scam.

Historian Tristram Hunt wrote in The Guardian back in October ("Toxic debts, collapsing banks and endemic fraud...ring any bells?") that George Bernard Shaw had claimed Little Dorrit to be a more seditious text than Marx's Das Kapital in its critique of capitalism. See here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/12/charlesdickens

To quote Mr Hunt: "...like many a modern finance house, Merdle's front was all fraud. Dickens modelled him on the railway speculator-turned-MP-turned-minister John Sadleir, who embezzled and then bankrupted the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank before killing himself. What makes Merdle's crime more heinous is the insouciant connivance of the Circumlocation Office, a poorly disguised Treasury peopled by incompetent officials ready to sign off any amount of City sharp practice."

And so it's Christmas and Dickens is still popping up everywhere...and what has this to do with Willow Pattern?

Dickens wrote about the Willow Pattern in his weekly journal "Household Words" in an essay entitled "A Plated Article". In April 1852 he found himself in Staffordshire and stayed the night in a pub called The Dodo which did not impress him. He is bored and possibly a bit lonely, and has "conceived a mortal hatred" of his lodgings. He has a plate of biscuits and is in the mood to burn the biscuits on the fire and break the plate. But first he looks at the back of the plate and realises it is made by the Copeland pottery that he has visited only the day before. He finds the plate, as he looks at it, "growing into a companion".

"And don't you remember (says the plate)...what we spring from:- heaps of lumps of clay, partially prepared and cleaned in Devonshire and Dorsetshire, whence said clay principally comes – and hills of flint, without which we should want our ringing sound, and should never be musical?..." Dickens tells us how the clay and flint are prepared..."And as to the flint and the clay together, are they not, after all this, mixed in the proportion of five of clay to one of flint, and isn't the compound – known as "slip" – run into oblong troughs, where its superfluous moisture may evaporate; and finally, isn't it slapped and banged and beaten and patted and kneaded and wedged and knocked about like butter, until it becomes a beautiful grey dough, ready for the potter's use?"

And so he goes on, describing in great detail how a plate is made, as though the plate were speaking to him, reminding him of each stage of production he had witnessed at the Copeland factory. Items are thrown or moulded, fired (he is quite enamoured with the drama of the firing process) and ornamented.

"And didn't you see (says the plate) planted upon my own brother that astounding blue willow, with knobbed and gnarled trunk, and foilage of blue ostrich feathers, which gives our family the title of "willow pattern"? And didn't you observe, transferred upon him at the same time, that blue bridge which spans nothing, growing out from the roots of the willow; and the three blue Chinese going over it into a blue temple, which has a fine crop of blue bushes sprouting out of the roof; and a blue boat sailing above them, the mast of which is burglariously sticking itself into the foundations of a blue villa, suspended sky-high, surmounted by a lump of blue rock, sky-higher, and a couple of billing blue birds, sky-highest – together with the rest of that amusing blue landscape, which has, in deference to our revered ancestors of our Cerulean Empire, and in defiance of every known law of perspective, adorned millions of our family ever since the days of platters?..."

Glowing and poetic words coming from the plate itself and not Dickens' own opinion apparently. He describes the transfer process, applied cleverly "by a light fingered damsel", and then takes a sideways swipe at the Willow Pattern: "I had seen all this – and more. I had been shown, at Copeland's, patterns of beautiful design, in faultless perspective, which are causing the ugly old willow to wither out of public favour; and which, being quite as cheap, insinuate good wholesome natural art into the humblest households."

The essay is also reprinted as an appendix in David Richard Quitner's "Willow!" (see booklist, right). Quitner says "Dickens...was blind to all artistic conventions but those he had grown used to in the dogmatic Victorian occidental world he inhabited." He reckons that Dickens was by now becoming quite wealthy and successful and was distainful of Blue Willow-ware's mass appeal and considered it "an object worthy of discard in the tortuous climb from hovel to estate."

Contrary to Quitner's interpretation, it is possible that Dickens' dislike of the design was wrapped up in his analysis of commercialism, industrialisation and the petit bourgeoisie, like another (although much later) critic of the design that Quitner found: a ceramic encyclopedist called Warren E Cox who briefly mentions the Willow Pattern is his 1944 Book of Pottery and Porcelain:

"...Nothing could better exemplify the utter dearth of aesthetic consciousness than the stupid copying of this design which lacks every element of true Chinese painting and any real claim to beauty whatsoever, and the maudlin stories wrought about it to please the sentimental old ladies of the late 18th century...the terrible willow pattern, sentimentally concocted from Chinese originals, was sent back to China to copy. Such is the effrontery of merchants."

Common as muck, indeed, and one of the first mass marketed products of the Industrial Revolution, whether churned out in China as export to order by foreign buyers, or made in England. But how lovely is this piece that my sister (with a good eye for antiques) found for my birthday this November. Marked Royal Doulton Burslem, England, Willow (known by the mark to be circa 1891-1902, a bit later than Dickens' visit to Staffordshire), it's a Flow Blue Willow vegetable bowl.



You can read Dickens' entire essay online (and also download other Dickens' writing, under Creative Commons License) at eBooks@Adelaide:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dickens/charles/d54rp/chapter20.html