Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition

I exhibited work from the George Brown Series as part of Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition, an interdisciplinary conference held at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 18-20 June 2015. My display in the Alison Richards Building will continue until September.

The George Brown Series is a group of ceramic vessels made in response to the George Brown Collection which I researched as part of an AHRC international placement at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in Osaka,  Japan. George Brown accumulated over 3000 ethnographic specimens while serving as a missionary in Oceania between 1860 and 1907. Described as ‘one of the most mobile collections in the world’, it has had a number of homes over the years, exercising the endeavours of a variety of people.

The George Brown Series was inspired by my research at the NME which focused on ‘transitional’ artefacts, in which influences from both the originating community and the European colonisers were manifest. A series of bamboo tubes from the Solomon Islands scrimshawed with scenes of European and indigenous encounters were of particular interest as they reminded me of some of the maritime imagery I was familiar with from my work on nineteenth century Sunderland pottery. These items spoke of the ‘creolization and hybridity’ characteristic of the colonial experience.

My porcelain vessels collage a range of visual and contextual information in order to communicate something of the collection’s complex history. Dutch traders took Sunderland pottery to Japan and it is not inconceivable that some pieces might have made it to Oceania. The George Brown Series exploits this conceit, imagining what a fusion of Solomon Island lime containers and Sunderland pottery might look like filtered through twenty-first century Japan.

Read more about the George Brown Collection here.

A selection of porcelain vessels from the George Brown Collection (2013-15).

A detail of my display at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge.

Instagram image of my installation at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge.

Viva display at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

I displayed a selection of my artwork in Museum Street, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, to coincide with my PhD viva voce examination on 6th February 2015. The exhibition ran until 8th March. It was great to have the display in such a prominent location in the museum and I was stopped a number of times by intrigued visitors while I was setting up.

The examination team was Prof. Stephen Dixon (Manchester School of Art, external), Dr Jeffrey Sarmiento (University of Sunderland, internal) and Prof. Peter Smith (University of Sunderland, chairman).

The 'Community in Clay' display in Museum Street, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens. Photograph copyright of Christopher McHugh, 2015.

A Present from Sunderland

Roker Lighthouse, postcard from collection of Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

Below is a message from Helix Arts, coordinators of 'A Present from Sunderland', a community art project printmaker Theresa Easton and myself  are currently taking part in. We are working with young people from Sunderland to design and make a range of souvenirs celebrating the Roker seafront regeneration and welcome any input you might have in terms of ideas, stories, memories, photographs, and the like. How to get involved is discussed below and you can also leave a comment at the bottom of this blog.

'A Present from Sunderland'

As part of the regeneration of the Roker seafront, an exciting new arts project has been set up to create a series of ‘products’ in response to the Roker seafront area.

Working with two local artists, young people from Sunderland Youth Offending Service’s Restorative Justice Programme are designing a range of mugs, tea-towels and beach kits under the banner of a Present from Sunderland. The products will then be sold in a number of cultural venue retail outlets across the City. Sale profits will go back into arts projects with young people in Sunderland.

We are gathering inspiration for the designs and we need your help!

Do you have old or new photographs of the seafront?

Any maps and plans of the area?

Perhaps a story to tell of smugglers at Spottees Cave?

Do you remember the crowds at the illuminations, sunny days filled with seaside adventures and tram car rides or leisurely walks along the promenade?

Or are you familiar with the wildlife of the cliffs and walkways over the ravine?

If you are happy to share these or would like a say in what should be included, please get in touch.

You can talk to Kate or Frances on 0191 241 4931

OR post us your thoughts, photographs and stories to us at:

Helix Arts, 2^nd Floor, The Old Casino, 1-4 Forth Lane, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 5HX

Email: sunderlandpresent@helixarts.com

You can also leave a comment at the bottom of this page. 

If you are Flickr member, please join our group and upload photos to the group pool:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/sunderlandpresent

Deadline for submissions is 6pm on Sunday 2 September 2012

 

The Pier, Roker, postcard from collection of Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

   

Bandstand, postcard from collection of Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

Firing Up exhibition at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

An exhibition of ceramic artwork made by students from several local secondary schools as part of the Crafts Council’s Firing Up scheme is currently on display in Museum Street at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (SMWG).  Firing Up is a national programme which aims to reinvigorate the teaching of ceramics in secondary schools. The project links schools with local university ceramics departments in order to create a sustainable infrastructure for skills exchange and education. The North East cluster was co-ordinated by Dr Andrew Livingstone, subject leader for ceramics at the University of Sunderland and leader of CARCuos, the Ceramic Arts Research Centre at the same institution.
Andrew also led ceramics workshops with staff and students at Wellfield Community School, while Robert Winter, ceramics technician and maker, together with CARCuos Artist in Residence, Katherine Butler, worked with Farringdon Sports Community College, Sandhill View Community Arts School and St Bede's Catholic School and Sixth Form Centre. I worked with approximately twenty Year 8 students and two members of staff from St Aidan’s Catholic School, Sunderland. Several undergraduate students from Glass and Ceramics also supported these sessions. Each school benefited from 4 full-day workshops delivered by a maker, as well as twilight skill-building sessions for the teachers run by Robert Winter at the National Glass Centre. Many of the schools will also receive Crafts Council funding to renew or refurbish their kilns, enabling them to continue using clay in their curriculum after the project has ended.
An important aim of the scheme is to demonstrate to school students how working with clay and ceramics can lead to a viable career and each maker adopted their own distinct approach to the project, reflecting their professional and creative interests. I was keen to incorporate my involvement in the project into both my PhD research and my wider artistic practice. After consultation with Alanna Nipper, St Aidan’s art teacher, I decided to adapt the ‘Tags, Tabs and Traces’ local mapping project suggested by Clayground Collective and the Crafts Council. Our project was loosely called ‘My Sunderland, My Museum’ and the participants were invited to initially make clay stamps and press moulds from personal items and found objects brought in from home. From these stamps, a series of ‘labels’ and ‘plaques’ were created. Finally, the students made a decorated slab-built box in which they could store the original items used to make the stamps, as well as any other personal ephemera, thereby creating their own miniature ‘museum’.
During the course of the project, Marie Harrison, SMWG's Assistant Learning Officer, led a session in the museum's Pottery Gallery, where my students enjoyed handling a range of objects from the handling collection before being sent on a treasure hunt around the museum to find iconic images and objects connected to Sunderland. The trip ended with a sketching activity back in the Pottery Gallery. It was intended that the visit would provide the students with an insight into the varied collections in Sunderland, with particular emphasis on the Sunderland pottery, which would inform the practical work they were making in the ceramics workshops. Knowing that their work was soon to be displayed in the museum, the students certainly seemed to enjoy the trip, their only complaint being that it was too short. Some students, taken with the 'frog mugs' on dispay, made their own versions back at  school, using slip-trailing techniques, inspired by other items in the collection, to decorate them.
Andrew’s approach was to spend the initial sessions focusing on developing basic clay skills which enabled the students to make work inspired by the architecture of their school.  Robert and Katherine’s students produced collage-like pieces combining textures, modelled elements and surface imagery.

Detail of work made by Year 8 students from St Aidan's Catholic School, Sunderland

The exhibition opening and North East Cluster Celebration event was held on Friday 13^th July and, according to Tony Quinn, Firing Up Project Co-ordinator, was the best attended event so far. The exhibition will run until 13^th September, 2012.

Christopher McHugh is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD student based at the University of Sunderland and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.

What's Your Story? Discovering Family History - The Milburn Jug

hen I heard that What’s Your Story? Discovering Family History, a Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums travelling exhibition, was coming to Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (SMWG), I was keen to get involved. As an artist working with this venue’s  collection of Sunderland pottery, I was interested to use this opportunity to explore links between the collection and the wider community of Sunderland through my creative ceramics practice.
In a previous exhibition, Kith and Kin: New Glass and Ceramics, held at the National Glass Centre earlier in the year, I had curated a cabinet of original Sunderland pottery alongside documents from the ‘Scott archive’, a collection of paper ephemera from the Southwick Pottery (1788-1897) I had re-accessioned as part of my research. Addressing the title of the exhibition, my display aimed to highlight the family aspect of the production and consumption of Sunderland pottery, demonstrating through objects how it had often been made by several generations of the same families. I also wanted to show how it had been used to commemorate and celebrate family events like births, deaths and marriages. New ceramic work, made in collaboration with members of the Sunderland community, was also displayed in order to establish a dialogue between the past and the present, exploring how ceramic objects have and can be used to commemorate personal and wider narratives.

The Crinson Jug with added labels.

As discussed in a previous blog, Howard Forster, a visitor to the exhibition, recognising some of the documents in my display from his own family history research, contacted me and we decided to make a new object which celebrated his family history through reference to his ancestors’ involvement in the Sunderland potteries. My blog about the Crinson Jug, led to an e-mail enquiry from Sally Hyde, a British-born, New Zealand-based occupational therapist whose fourth great-grandfather, William Milburn, had also been a master potter at Southwick Pottery. Further investigation of the ‘Scott Archive’ revealed a letter addressed to the Durham Agricultural Society dated 1845 showing that William started working at Southwick Pottery in 1788 and continued for 57 years. Milburn would have been a contemporary of William Crinson and his son, Robert, who started working at Southwick in 1788 and 1817 respectively.
For my contribution to the What’s Your Story exhibition, I decided to make a further jug to celebrate this connection as well as Sally’s quest to trace her family tree. This jug, which utilises much imagery collected by Sally on her ‘journey’ has been displayed in a desk case alongside the Crinson Jug and associated archive materials relating to the Milburns and Crinsons, including the above letter, Mark Crinson’s indenture and a letter from Robert Crinson, Mark’s nephew and William’s great grandson. The Crinson Jug has been ‘updated’, by the addition of ceramic labels printed with photographs of Howard Forster, his son and grandson. Interesting for me was the process of making the Milburn Jug which was negotiated remotely through e-mail correspondence and access to Sally’s Ancestry.com guest account. Sally has written a story about her own family history research which can be viewed on the What’s Your Story? website.

The Milburn Jug

How an engagement with creativity, whether it results from tracing one’s family tree or crafting new objects, can help to define one’s identity and sense of self, a theme which has emerged through my recent ceramic practice, also appears to be a wider concern within academia and society. This is well illustrated by Sally’s experience of tracing her family history which seems to have helped her to cope with living far away from her family roots:

I was living in New Zealand and the whole process of creating the next generation started me thinking, and wanting to know about who had gone before. I have lived in New Zealand since 1986; I often feel the distance and a loss in so far as hearing family stories and family information, and this became more acute after the birth of my daughter. We visited my parents in the UK in 2000 and together with my mother began to investigate the past.

Similarly, an ability to empathise with her potter ancestor has helped to guide her own pursuit of making and collecting ceramics:

The knowledge of a Master Potter in my ancestry was great news to me as I have been working at an adolescent mental health unit as an Occupational Therapist for two years since my return to New Zealand in 2010. I have discovered a keen interest in pottery. My work is of a very amateur level, but I like to think that William guides me, and that my DNA assists too.
I don’t have any knowledge of what pieces of pottery William Milburn was involved in creating. I would love to have more information, but am not sure how to obtain this information or even know if it is obtainable. I have since purchased some Sunderland lustre ware pieces of pottery and would like to add more to my collection. I am especially interested in the pieces with a nautical theme which, for me, is inspired by my ancestors that follow from William Milburn who were sea farers. There is a family tendency to sail to foreign shores.

My intention with both jugs was to use relatively ephemeral information from digital photographs and scanned original documents to create enduring, dramatic material focal points or ‘micro-sites’ for commemoration and reflection. Family histories are often lost or not fully passed down the generations. These jugs are attempts to explore how ceramics can be used to preserve such fragile histories through a creative articulation of past and present. The degree to which translating Sally’s and Howard’s research into material objects has helped them to reflect upon their personal histories and how engaged they have felt in the creative process are perhaps questions I can reflect upon as part of my research.
What’s Your Story? offers an example of how museums can respond to the grassroots preoccupations of their visitors, empowering them to frame their own histories through the creation of dialogues between personal stories and items in the collection. The role the craft practitioner can play in the encouragement and mediation of this creativity, especially with reference to a collection, provides rich potential for innovative research. The combination of object making activities and museum display with digital participatory media leads to the possibility of the collection, the community and the artist being linked virtually as well as materially.
Did any of your ancestors work in the Sunderland potteries? Do you own or collect Sunderland pottery or do you know someone who does? If so, we’d love to hear from you.
Read more about the Crinson and Milburn families on the What’s Your Story? website: www.whatsyourstory.org.uk. What’s Your Story? Discovering Family History runs until the 27th August, 2012 at the Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.

Christopher McHugh is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD student based at the University of Sunderland and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens. Read more about his project at www.communityinclay.org.uk.