'I'm Not The Criminal,' 2019, A Pot from 'And The Door Opened'

'Im Not The Criminal,' 2019, 60h x 38w cm  

I'm Not The Criminal

The dominant image of, 'I'm Not The Criminal,' is the portrait of Fiona Broadfoot, a sex trade survivor and campaigner for the abolition of the sex trade. She is one of three women who, with the Centre for Women's Justice, brought the judicial review to have the criminal convictions of exited women removed from the records. Currently, those convictions remain on police records for one hundred years - longer than the life of the woman herself - surely one of the most inhumane and vindictive legal sanctions we have in Britain and wholly unjustifiable. The title of the pot comes from the hashtag adopted for the campaign, #I'mNoCriminal. I am indebted to Fiona for her help with this project, 'And The Door Opened,' which I'm doing in partnership with Women @the Well.  You can read more about her on this website - scroll right until you find her. 

Two Titles

'I'm Not The Criminal,' in its unbroken state, was called, 'The Invisible Man.' On the outside, it depicts a burlesque of hideous characters on the sex trade merry-go-round. These are the men who buy sex, also known as punters/johns/tricks. You can call them what you want - they amount to the same thing: they are the men who pay to abuse exploited and prostituted women and girls. This is not an, 'equal financial transaction,' as some claim, they are buying the submission and, crucially, the silence of the women they abuse. It also depicts the pimps, brothel owners, hotel and escort agency owners, travel tour guides who run 'stag nights,' and so on. It depicts the men who 'groom,' in gangs, the church men, the legal teams who dismiss the testimony of the girls as 'unreliable,' and the police who arrest the exploited girls and women but not the pimps or punters. One of the reasons these pots are broken and rebuilt is to smash the power and dominance of the men and to bring out and emphasise the courage and persistence of the women to speak out, ‘break the silence,’ and campaign for change. This is also the reason for the changing title – it expresses the women’s refusal to submit to the social and legal sanctions imposed on them, and on all prostituted women and girls, and their capacity to wrest the power from the dominant abusive men to effect change in their own lives and in society.

Why ‘Invisible?’

'The Invisible Man,' was so called because the public conversation and focus of every second of media coverage from obscure internet channels to social media to mainstream TV and radio to print journalism, is on the women. It is hardly ever on the men. The men of the sex trade - who are its market, its life blood - the abusers and profiteers, define and embody the sex trade but they escape scrutiny and act with impunity day in day out while the women, the abused and exploited, get the blame and stigma. I am not wholly opposed to stigma - I just think it needs to be relocated - on to the men. I owe this title to Julie Bindel whose excellent book, 'The Pimping of Prostitution,' Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 includes a chapter on this subject, called 'The Invisible Man.' I would also like to alert the reader the work of Raquel Rosario Sanchez who is currently research men who buy sex using the reviews they write of the women they abuse in prostitution.

How and why: the images on the pot – inside and out

The pot is painted on the inside as well the outside. The inside is painted as the pot is being built up. The colours inside are lighter and brighter than the exterior colours so that once the pot has been broken and rebuilt the interior is clearly visible through the gaps. There are images of women on horseback painted inside. It is an allegorical and idealistic image of escape – as though the merry go round horses have come to life to carry the women away to a safer life. The portrait of Fiona Broadfoot was painted on the biggest shard, after the pot was broken. This was to ensure her image was complete. There are images of broken faces of women inside – again I have no wish to deny the damage the sex trade does to women and girls – but I do not want these to be the only images visible.

The merry-go-round motif on this pot is one I have used many times. It is perfect for the dynamic, turning form of a pot and allows a satirical, grotesque characterisation of the men depicted. The Merry-go-round horses get more vicious every time I paint them. These are biting and kicking the men, bucking them off and trampling on them. I want to express the violence of the sex trade - it is necessary to do so. I do not want to hide from it but I have no desire to reproduce images of sexualised violence against women by these men in pictorial form. Another reason to smash the pot is to expresses the violence.

Breaking pots

This pot – in its first state, as ‘The Invisible Man,’ was broken as part of a march against the sex trade in Bradford. (This is an earlier post on this blog.) It was also a memorial procession which ended with a calling out of the all the names of women murdered in prostitution since records have been kept. At the end of a minute's silence, the pot was smashed. The shards were collected and taken back to the studio. There I added the new images, glazed the shards, fired them and then pieced the pot back together, leaving gaps through which the images of the women who have survived the sex trade become visible. The gaps are edged in gold leaf to frame and emphasise the women and to honour their courage and their struggle to survive.

A fired pot can be pieced back together so that it, near enough, retrieves its original form. It is more fragile now and will break again if subject to further pressure but it is remarkably robust and will last well into the future. The method for making the pots is based on the expression, 'I was shattered. Now I'm piecing myself slowly back together.' Or 'I have to completely rebuild my life.' These and similar expressions are commonly used by anyone who has experienced major trauma. The process is a metaphor, in effect, for the trauma and the process of surviving and living into the future. Sex trade survivors often carry a deeply embodied trauma. They are vulnerable to further pressures but, nonetheless, many survive and, eventually, thrive.

Pots - photo credit: Sylvain Deleu.

Smashed pot - photo credit: Studio Twelve, Bradford

Women @the Well, (W@W,) is a women-only service located in Kings Cross dedicated to supporting women whose lives are affected, or at risk of being affected, by prostitution. It also provides support to exit prostitution. 

‘And The Door Opened,’ is a series of events with displays of Claudia’s pots, with talks and demonstrations that illustrate the lives of the women supported by W@W.

The aim is to enhance the public’s understanding of what prostitution is, to name the abuse and exploitation, and to show that, with the right support, girls and women do not need to live and die exploited in the sex trade – there are ways out.

'February, Dark and Cold,' 2019, a pot from 'And The Door Opened,'

'February Dark and Cold,' 2019, 63 h x 28 w cm 

Hand built earthenware pot, slip-painted inside and out with sgraffito drawing through the slip. Bisque fired. Smashed by dropping it into a box on the floor. The box helps to contain the flying shards but it also breaks the fall to some extent so the shattering isn't so dramatic. Some of the larger pieces were dropped again to encourage them to break a bit more. The shards were then collected up and glazed, then fired, and the pieces reassembled with some left out so the viewer can glimpse the images inside. Broken edges gilded in gold leaf.

About the pot
This is the account of a young woman, a fifteen year old girl at the start of her story, whose mother had a job that frequently took her abroad. She seems to have had no other parent or guardian so was left alone. The account is sparse. At some point she has a son, has a drink and drug problem, and also mental health difficulties. When W@W first meet her, she is being sold for sex on the London streets. They help her to 'return to her northern town,' to her family. She leaves again. It appears there is sexual abuse and/or exploitation but it is not spelled out. She returns to London and is street homeless - and immensely vulnerable to (further?) exploitation in prostitution. She describes the cold dark damp of February and the violence on the London streets. At some point she is arrested and is in prison for a while. Once out of prison she contacts W@W again and gets support with the drugs and alcohol problems. They also help her to find a housing solution. This very young woman with a history of abuse going back to her early teenage years now has an interlocking mix of problems which, together, make housing and a future life immensely difficult. The pot has a number of gaps and cracks. This young woman's process of mending her life is only midway, probably. She still has a long way to go. She misses her child. It is unclear where her mother and the rest of her family is. What is clear is that she knows W@W are there to provide support when she needs it.

Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu.

Women @the Well, (W@W,) is a women-only service located in Kings Cross dedicated to supporting women whose lives are affected, or at risk of being affected, by prostitution. It also provides support to exit prostitution. 

‘And The Door Opened,’ is a series of events with displays of Claudia’s pots, with talks and demonstrations that illustrate the lives of the women supported by W@W.

The aim is to enhance the public’s understanding of what prostitution is, to name the abuse and exploitation, and to show that, with the right support, girls and women do not need to live and die exploited in the sex trade – there are ways out.

'Street Exit,' 2019, A Pot from And The Door Opened

 

 

'Street Exit,' 2019, 60 h x 28 w cm 

Hand built earthenware pot, slip-painted inside and out with sgraffito drawing through the slip. The bisque fired pot was then smashed with a hammer - an uncomfortable process - avoiding hitting any of the women, just going for the bits in between. Shards collected up and glazed, then fired, and the pieces reassembled with some left out so the viewer can glimpse the images inside. Broken edges gilded in gold leaf.

About the pot
'Street Exit,' is based on an account given to me by Women @the Well. The images inside the pot show the living places of a homeless woman who met W@W outreach workers in Hackney. She describes 'sofa surfing' with friends who were 'heavy substance users.' She wanted to get away from them so she moved to a tent in a 'green area in Hackney.' She was being exploited in prostitution in both these situations.W@W helped find a place in a hostel and set in motion a support system to help her to reduce and eventually cease her substance use and also to find a way to exit prostitution with the ultimate aim of finding safe, permanent accommodation. The latter is a longer term and probably more difficult goal to achieve given the extreme shortage of safe housing for women in London - particularly those with such complex range of vulnerabilities.

The outside of the pot shows the progress of a woman from street to hostel based on details from the above account and some others along with my own encounters with street homeless women on public transport. Homeless women often avoid hostels because they are heavily male dominated and pose a real threat of sexual violence from the men there. They also avoid the street, if they can, for the same reasons - and also because of the cold, the wet and the sheer exhaustion of never really sleeping -  so public transport, being both public, rather than hidden, and a bit warmer and dryer is potentially a better option. The images above show a woman begging in the underground both at the station and on a train, sleeping - or trying to - in the station and on a bus and, finally, in a hostel sitting at table with a cup of tea contemplating the long and difficult process ahead. Like many of the accounts W@W have asked me to work with, this woman's life is very 'in process.' She has not yet reached a safe conclusion.

'Street Exit,' like 'Women @the Well,' the pot posted earlier, is a broken and mended pot. The images inside are visible through the gaps but only just. You do need to see the pot, 'in person,' to be able to see them. The shattering of the pot is a metaphor the broken feelings the woman expresses and her process of slowly piecing her life back together. It is an imperfect process. She is unlikely to reach a state of complete 'restoration,' but she can continue to live and may be able to thrive, in time. Memories and images of her past will impinge on her present from time to time, however. She may well not live in the past but the past, to some extent, will probably live in her, in her 'emotional muscle memory,' if I may put it that way, and it may be expressed through her emotional responses to things and to situations. I frame the fissures and and gaps in gold leaf to honour her survival and her struggle to proceed through life.

Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu.

Women @the Well, (W@W,) is a women-only service located in Kings Cross dedicated to supporting women whose lives are affected, or at risk of being affected, by prostitution. It also provides support to exit prostitution. 

‘And The Door Opened,’ is a series of events with displays of Claudia’s pots, with talks and demonstrations that illustrate the lives of the women supported by W@W.

The aim is to enhance the public’s understanding of what prostitution is, to name the abuse and exploitation, and to show that, with the right support, girls and women do not need to live and die exploited in the sex trade – there are ways out.

'Women @the Well,' 2019 a pot from 'And The Door Opened.'

'Women @the Well,' 2019,  50 h x 32 w cms.
Hand built earthenware pot, slip-painted inside and out with sgraffito drawing through the slip. Smashed with a hammer after the first firing - an uncomfortable process - avoiding hitting any of the women, just going for the bits in between. Shards collected up and glazed, then fired and the pieces reassembled with some left out so the viewer can glimpse the images inside. Broken edges gilded in gold leaf.

About the pot
'Women @the Well,' the eponymous pot for the project, is based on an account given to me by the organisation I'm working with, (W@W).
The account had a strong sense of the past being shut away, for now, anyway. The woman describes her young life, raised in the care system, and being on the streets at an early age, being prostituted to get money for drugs for the pimp, (though she, herself was not using them to begin with,) street homeless and, in the end, in and out of prison. She describes herself as 'destitute, dirty and down.' Now she is being supported by W@W where she gets clean clothes, a hot meal and has a 'named worker.' That connection with a support worker whose name she knows and who knows her name seemed absolutely vital in this account. Here she was treated as fully human, perhaps for the first time in her young adult life. She was learning some basic skills, she had help to find housing - appropriated for her needs. In all the accounts I have read there is a powerful sense of separation  - an almost impregnable wall - between the 'world of the prostituted and the rest of the world.' This woman seems to be starting to breach that wall, starting to feel part of the world. Knowing another woman's name - a professional woman, not someone in the prostituted world - and her own name being known to her 'named worker,' was central to that process. She is also contacting family - there is one, somewhere.

The images you see on the pot are of her with her worker at W@W. They're all fictional images. I had to imagine her there and imagine what she might look like. Confidentiality is key to success so this is why I'm working with prepared accounts. I have shut her past away inside the pot but it appears in the cracks from time to time. The other common thread in all the accounts is trauma. These are women grossly abused and exploited, often from an early age, and exposed to persistent violence and brutality. Recovery from trauma is long process and rarely complete. Sex trade survivors remain vulnerable to further pressure. The broken pot, mended, but not fully, is a metaphor for surviving sexual violence and exploitation. It is not easy to do justice to these accounts and I did not want to avoid the shattering experiences these women had endured but nor did I want to reproduce the violence in pictures. Breaking and rebuilding the pot was the best approach. It represents the slow recovery and the lasting vulnerability while also honouring the courage of the women to survive and find different lives.

Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu.

Women @the Well, (W@W,) is a women-only service located in Kings Cross dedicated to supporting women whose lives are affected, or at risk of being affected, by prostitution. It also provides support to exit prostitution. 

‘And The Door Opened,’ is a series of events with displays of Claudia’s pots, with talks and demonstrations that illustrate the lives of the women supported by W@W.

The aim is to enhance the public’s understanding of what prostitution is, to name the abuse and exploitation, and to show that, with the right support, girls and women do not need to live and die exploited in the sex trade – there are ways out.

On The Record: writing my own art history

Introduction

Writing one’s own art history is always going to be risky; it’s subject to human memory, which is notoriously unreliable. Fortunately, I am a diary writer and an avid collector of exhibition catalogues so there is at least some documentary evidence for the claims I might make. The following is an account of the artists, exhibitions and movements which have had a significant effect on my work and on the way I think about ceramics.

Marc Chagall

An exhibition of paintings (1967-77) by Marc Chagall, at Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1978 was the first to make a real, memorable impact on me. I went to see it time and again over the course of a month that summer. They looked beautiful and made sense to me, more so, if I was honest, than much of the rather grandiose religious art that I was supposed to be studying at the time. They seemed to be telling a story, though what that story was, was wholly obscure to me at the time.

Later, studying ‘fine art,’ which at that time was painting, drawing and print-making, at Camberwell School of Art and Craft, (1981-85), my depraved and superficial taste for such ‘illustrational, decorative’ works as these was dismissed as woefully unserious and uneducated. I was introduced to Bonnard and got a season ticket to an exhibition of paintings by Pisarro, apparently these were the acceptable face of figurative art which Chagall, curiously, wasn’t. I was painting landscapes at this time, but I was a village girl and now lived in London and hadn’t learnt to love the London landscape yet. I was getting interested in its people though and, in particular, their stories which were so different from mine but with so many meeting points.

Kathe Kollwitz

An exhibition of graphic works by Kathe Kollwitz at Kettles Yard, in Cambridge, in 1982 was the next ‘Ah – YES!’ moment. These were intimate, everyday stories about ordinary people and their extraordinary struggle to survive. It was a struggle which Kollwitz shared, in that she inhabited the same place and time and lived through the same wars, but from a distance: she was comparatively well off and her subjects are mostly people profoundly oppressed by poverty. Even so she seemed able to capture something of their lives, experience, concerns, and above all, their humanity. They were not objectified as ‘The Poor.’ Again my interests were at odds with those of the institution: ‘Manifesto,’ hissed the head of department, with unrestrained contempt.

Soviet Porcelain

In 1984 the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in partnership with the Crafts Council in London, mounted an exhibition entitled, 'Art into production: Soviet Ceramics and Textiles.’ The ceramics, Soviet Porcelain, was breath taking. The Imperial porcelain factory in St. Petersburg had been requisitioned by the Bolsheviks, in 1917, and hordes of young, idealistic, revolutionary artists eagerly joined the factory to paint the porcelain ‘blanks.’ These works were explicitly propagandist and magnificently designed and painted. Here was an extraordinary moment in art history, quietly overlooked by established art historical discourse, which fused revolutionary fervour with art – or rather craft and industrial production – but it was painters, Kandinsky, Goncharova, Popova and the constructivists, Suetin among others, who were the main exponents of this work. I remember thinking I had found the answer to all my questions about how to proceed as an artist. I was, by then, working towards my final degree show, but in the back of my mind, simmering quietly, was a growing understanding that, contrary to the tired dogma of the art school I attended, there was a way to bring political activism and art together. I had seen two examples in as many years, both recognised by highly respected and authoritative art institutions and both had stood the test of time.

Taking action

After four years at Camberwell, I understood that painting was not for me, but what to do? I had learnt which medium I didn’t want to use, but not which ones I did. I continued drawing. After graduation I joined a women’s life drawing group. There were five of us. Buoyed up with voluminous feminist idealism and determined to rip through every last thread of the patriarchal fabric, we decided that the notion of the artist’s model was a grotesque misogynist conspiracy and we would boldly challenge the entire concept and, in so doing, rock the history of art to its roots. Thus it was, that in the top room of the squat in Peckham, in summer 1985, the five of us got naked and drew each other drawing each other. I do still have the documentary evidence. It is in my shed and there it will stay. Charmingly absurd though it may seem in some respects, it was an immensely productive time as well as being probably the best life class I have ever attended – we were meeting for at least a year. The history of art plainly didn’t register so much as shiver never mind anything else but, for my part, a new chapter of art practice opened up. 

The Think Black Line and so much more

The life-class was on Monday. On Wednesdays we went to exhibitions. ‘The Thin Black Line,’ curated by Lubaina Himid, was at the ICA that year. The first exhibition of the work of black women, it was, both explicitly activist, on the part of the artists, something which we well understood, and ‘notoriously tokenistic,’ on the part of the institution. Either way, it was a hugely exciting exhibition. Himid’s magnificent cut-outs, (Tate Britain), and Sutapa Biswas’ now famous image, ‘Housewives with Steaknives,’ (Tate Britain), burnt themselves into my consciousness and have never departed. Four years later, ‘Along the lines of Resistance,’ also an explicitly feminist show, introduced me to the work of Nina Edge, the first contemporary potter I came across whose work truly excited me. It looked good, was colourful, decorative, ornamental and told stories – interesting ones. Lubaina Himid later became a much needed adviser for my PhD. One of the most significant aspects of this strand of contemporary art practice was its non-hierarchical position on craft, shaped largely by anti-imperialist / post-colonial politics combined with feminism.

By means of a mildly eccentric life-drawing class, and a series of important exhibitions of work by contemporary feminist artists, I had found a way to be an artist that could embrace both ceramics, which I now loved, and other peoples’ stories, which I also loved and understood in their wider, socio-political contexts. The repeated mantra I had received at art school which stated that ‘art and politics don’t mix,’ was plainly bunkum. The key was a sophisticated, educated understanding of all the elemental parts: art, narrative, and the social impact of politics on the lived experience of people.

The Country Potter

It was September 1985, with the new term starting, that one of the life-class women announced she was going to a pottery class and asked if any of us would come with her. We all went but I was the one that continued for next three years. I had found the medium that was, without question, the right one. In 1989 I moved to Oxford and started an apprenticeship at Winchcombe Pottery with Ray Finch. To say the least it was a culture shock. I was back in the village. It was a sharp reminder of why I had moved to London. The landscape was like something out of Thomas Hardy at times but so were the social attitudes – it was sometimes depressing, other times highly entertaining.

Yorkshire - and the Hungarians

The subculture of ceramics was also a culture shock. This was an art practice apparently untouched by feminism or, indeed, any of the social movements or art discourses which had become part of my social and artistic norm in London in the 1980s. So here I was, first in Oxford, then in Yorkshire, in the 1990s, wondering in which part of the 20^th century I had landed. My nine years in Yorkshire were highly productive in terms of my own work but something of a desert in terms of influences. Ceramicist Paul Scott, who has pioneered and popularised the development of printmaking techniques for potters, was an important teacher and introduced me to the work of Hungarian maker Maria Geszler. A visit to Hungary and to her workshop included a trip to Szentendre where I found and was captivated by the work of Margit Kovacs, (1902-77). The museum in Szentendre holds almost all of her work which has not, to date, been seen in this country. The Zsolnay Museum in Pecs, home of the Zsolnay Factory, introduced me to the work of the estimable Therese and Julia Zsolnay, the Zsolnay sisters, in whose name I produced a collection of work: 'Collection for the Zsolnay Sisters,' (1999).

Arguably, my most important encounter during my time in Yorkshire was with Lubaina Himid and the late Maud Sulter, (1960-2008), then both living nearby, in Preston. I was meeting two of the most important and inspirational women of my art-life. Maud was opening a new gallery in London, 'Rich Women of Zurich,' and invited me to do a show there. There gallery was short lived but the friendship endured until Maud's death in 2008. They helped to take me out of the then somewhat parochial world of craft pottery and return me to the wider art world from which I had come. It was in their gallery that I showed 'Collection for the Zolnay Sisters,' my first London solo show in a private gallery. 

My one other memorable ceramic encounter of this time was when my sister sent me a newspaper cutting, a review of an exhibition by someone called Grayson Perry who was showing pots at Anthony D’offay Gallery in London. ‘Someone’s stolen your ideas!’ she exclaimed in the accompanying note. There was just one tiny picture. My heart sank and I felt sick. I worried about this apparent incursion for days. After the initial shock, however, I quite quickly came to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do about it even if it were true, which, I suspected, it probably wasn’t, and resolved to continue with what I was doing, and let life take its course. I also resolved not to look at the imposter’s work, and that included looking at pictures of his work. A couple of years later, in 1999, I had a show in London at a gallery called, Rich Women of Zurich, (directors Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid,) and two people came in wanting to meet Grayson Perry. They had looked through the window and thought my work was his. I was told there were a couple of his pots in the Crafts Council Gallery down the road and the following day I went to see them, in person, as it were. The personal encounter was hugely reassuring. They were completely different. They were big painted pots, and had printed images on them, which mine did too at that time, but there the similarity ended.

Back to London

The move back to London in 2001 was prompted by a trip to Australia in summer1999 where I met Edmund de Waal, who was giving the key-note speech at a conference. He talked about Bernard Leach in ways I recognised, in the same way that Nina Edge had talked about Leach-influenced pottery in an essay in Feminist Art News in 1988[1] and, rather more damningly in, ‘Your Name Is Mud,’ (Sulter, 1990: 155-67). Ceramics, it seemed was beginning to acknowledge the twentieth century, just in time for the twenty-first.

In the last ten years, I have encountered a few truly inspiring contemporary ceramicists. They include, Tehran based, Iranian artist, Bita Fayyazi, whose work I first saw in Contemporary Iranian Art, at the Barbican, 2001, and who I now count as a good friend; Klara Kristalova, whose magical fairy-tale, figurative work is represented in London by Alison Jacques; and Israeli / Australian potter, Avital Sheffer, represented by Beaux Art in England and numerous outlets in Australia. I am eternally grateful to Grayson Perry for his success since, I suspect, it has opened doors for me. It has certainly made it much easier to tell people that I make pots with pictures, (as opposed to patterns), painted on them, and that I show this work in art galleries. There was once a time, not long ago, when that was considered inconceivable, it is now regarded as almost normal, a process of change in which he has played a significant part alongside increasingly open minded curators and institutions.

---

[1] Also in ‘Artists Stories,’ A-N publications, 1996

A Wedding and a Funeral: two pots in my forthcoming show at Francis Kyle Gallery

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Images from top:
1. St. Mark of the Farm (left) and Wedding Procession (right)
2. St. Mark of the Farm
3. St. Mark of the Farm 
4. Wedding Procession
5. Wedding Procession
6. Wedding Procession, (detail)

Introduction

Two pots, both based on classical storage jar shapes and painted around the circumference as a frieze, depict verdant landscapes, dominated by tall trees against blue-grey, English skies. Both feature teams of white, plumed horses, swanky cars and quantities of bling. They appear similar at first glance but the events taking place within the landscapes could hardly be more different. ‘Wedding Procession,’ commemorates the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in April 2011. The event and the way it was mediated affirmed the continuity of monarchy and the power of the state. ‘St. Mark of the Farm,’ is a record of the funeral of Mark Duggan, who was shot by police on August 4^th 2011, precipitating four nights of rioting. Duggan’s story is still extensively mythologised. He is, at once, the Hero: ‘people looked up to him;’ Villain: ‘Starrish Mark, leader of the notorious Star gang;’ Saint: ‘he was a lovely guy, everyone knew him, he wouldn’t hurt a fly;’ and Martyr: ‘a fallen soldier.’ His funeral, all in white, with white lilies on the casket like the virgin bride, was in September, six months after the wedding. The similarities in appearance were beguiling but they served only to emphasise the vast social difference. It was a spectacle of inequality, a mis-matched pair that bookended the summer and seemed to define the troubled social politics of the time.

Wedding Procession

The Royal Wedding was a brilliantly choreographed spectacle and a thoroughly crafted conceit, where sharp contrasts and rigorously controlled separation together defined the illusion of a shared national drama.

The pot form provides a stage where the separation and contrasts become visible. We cannot see the bride in her carriage because she is obscured by trees. At the event itself, the public were separated from royalty by both the physical barriers and the carefully mediated story, a richly embroidered fairy tale. The public are ‘below stairs’ on the pot - below the outermost curve. The separation is emphasised by the receding perspectives above and below the curve. The wedding procession itself takes place on the upper section among the trees, reaching up towards the skies.

This was the first of the English royal weddings to encounter and be captured by popular mass communication. The public are depicted photographing the event, a forest of outstretched arms pointing their camera phones towards the glimpses of procession visible through the trees. Of the images uploaded to the internet, the most photographed part of the wedding was the runaway horse whose journey was captured at every stage. The official ‘central’ figures were marginal by comparison.

To make the pot, I looked at an endless stream of flickering, moving, transitory and, often, ephemeral images and painted and fired a selection of them into a material that lasts for thousands of years – icing on the fictional cake perhaps.

St. Mark of the Farm

Set in and around Tottenham and the Broadwater Farm estate, St. Mark of the Farm shares many visual and narrative elements with Wedding Procession. The trees, the procession and the white, plumed horses suggest a wedding, but this is a funeral. It is a deeply personal, family event where sorrow and loss mix with pageantry, spectacle and a suppressed public interest. Duggan’s story is also highly fictionalised, the romance of the ‘villain’ who dies a saint. The landscape, which embraces this drama is, par excellence, a romantic urban construction, simultaneously historic and contemporary. It is the landscape through which I walk daily to work, from my house in Tottenham, right by ‘the Farm,’ as the estate is known locally, to my studio in Wood Green.

Standing in Broadwater Farm, which wears its inner city notoriety like a badge of honour, is a confusing experience, particularly at dawn or dusk in winter when it feels mysteriously rural. At these times, this large estate often falls silent. The Moselle river, which was once reduced to a foul, concrete lined ditch in the 1960s, is now being retrieved with help from a lottery grant, and snakes along the bottom of the willow-tree lined valley with Alexandra Palace glittering in the distance. The last of the day light glows pink in the damp, starting-to-flood, valley floor and the moon appears above the roof tops to the south. At these times you can almost hear the cows mooing – it was a dairy farm until well into the mid-twentieth century and was then converted to allotments. Because of the flooding, there were no buildings until the estate was built in 1965 and the Moselle was forced, reluctantly, underground. Like all rivers it refuses to stay there and reappears every winter in the form of floods which, in turn fill with geese, gulls and migrating birds, adding the extraordinary rural illusion. Mark Duggan grew up on this estate. His family are still there.

The pot uses all the elements of the landscape and exaggerates and idealises them to enhance the narrative. The idealised Mark, the saint, the ‘family man,’ is suggested by the evening landscape with the river, which is borrowed from the background landscapes of pre-renaissance, religious paintings. The three distinct scenes are those of the birth and early life, the death, and the funeral. The death landscape is Tottenham Hale, a low horizon line, bleak, empty and soulless, a reality of the place itself and an inescapable metaphor. The Farm is, co-incidentally, the lowest point in the landscape for some miles around, so the only way out of the estate is up hill.  The blocks of flats were built on giant concrete stilts, with aerial walkways instead of streets because of the flooding and these too have become part of its notoriety and mythology. The cemetery at Wood Green, where Duggan is buried, is, by contrast, on the brow of a hill, commanding a fine view across north London. It is here, at the funeral in white, that Duggan completes his transformation from villain to hero to martyr and finally to saint.

The Role of Landscape

I made the pots to remember and to witness the events they depict. I chose to emphasise the image of the landscape in which they occurred as a metaphor for the construction of social myths. What constitutes an urban or rural landscape cannot be taken for granted. Urban landscapes can be much more verdant than their rural counterparts and are often, wealthier, less industrialised and more nurtured. The rural ‘idyll’ is more apparent in the wealthier parts of London, with its carefully selected native English trees and artfully tended ‘wild’ areas, than in small-town England, where industrial farming is in a state of decline and rural poverty results in neglect. The Royal Wedding took place in central London, the centre of power and wealth and the seat of government and monarchy. In this setting, it also resembled a magnificent mythic hunting scene from a Renaissance tapestry – a resemblance I sought to repeat on the pot by introducing exotic birds in the trees and flattening the perspective.

Mark Duggan’s funeral took place in one of the poorest parts of London. One might have expected a landscape of bleak estates, broken windows and impressive graffiti. But this kind of grit-chic is another romantic urban construction, generated in the studio for music videos. There is certainly nothing like it in Tottenham in late summer. On the contrary, the traces of its rural and prosperous past are splendidly visible at this time, in both parks and streets, where the vast mature Willows, Oaks and Ash dominate the landscape. Wood Green also carries the memory of a prosperous suburban history. ‘Arcadia Gardens’ is not a fiction – or not on the pot anyway. That really is the name of the road.

Landscape does, however, become a part of the political analysis of spectacular inequality if we compare the image of the Royal couple in the Aston Martin in the Mall with the remarkably similar image of Tottenham Hale, where Duggan was shot. The low horizon lines are similar and both images are framed with abundantly leafy trees. While the Aston Martin and balloons are the decorative feature of the royal landscape, the road at Tottenham Hale appears to go nowhere and the only decoration is the cascade of synthetic flowers adorning the railings, a shrine to the ‘fallen soldier,’ or rehabilitated ‘saint.’

Ending International Feminist Futures? (??????)

Say, what? ---

I was puzzled by the title too but, undaunted, high-tailed it off to Aberdeen, gorgeous, graceful, granite-grey city, glistening sea-side, stately trees and rushing, shining river, bright winter sun and magnificent (eat yer heart out Cambridge and Oxford), magnificent university campus, and had a whale of a time at the conference above named.

What's in the Name?
First things first, why Ending? It’s all in the question mark, of course. It seems that some feminist academics are engaged in one of those quasi-apocalyptic moments, a bit like the art world gets into about every ten years or so, when a bunch of people produce manifestos or articles or similar saying ‘the end of art?’(craft/global capitalism/ celebrity/ religion/ life/ the universe – delete as applicable), and organise endless conferences, seminars, happenings, etc to discuss the matter and generally create much carbon emission.

'Hell No!'
So, I added my carbon footprint to everyone else’s and went and said, ‘hell no,’ along with all the other speakers and everyone there who said, ‘hell no’ too. This was in fact the last of four conferences, which, I now suspect, were convened chiefly to say a monumental collective, ‘hell no’ very loudly. And we did. There certainly wasn’t any sign of feminism ending, quite the contrary; there were a great many new beginnings, much growing of small, feminist bean sprouts. Oh and some splendid making of cheese cakes.

'So then what happened?'
The genesis of the four workshops/conferences was something to do with International Relations, although this conference was hosted by Marysia Zalewski and the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Gender Studies and School of Social Science. There was an IR tinge to most of the papers, but not all. It was admirably varied, quite a bit of cultural studies, some media studies, a very cool genomics meets eco feminism via science fiction joint paper, a study of how women were pictured by Communist Poland and then by the Solidarity movement ‘women tractor drivers to Solidarity women’, I talked about Shattered. Actually, I talked about Traffic, which is one the pots in Shattered, (see website), and there were several papers which were either about trafficking or touched on it somewhere. A Dutch woman talked about feminist Egyptian (documentary) Cinema, (that one was really fascinating,) a Turkish woman, talked about the construction of Turkish masculinity through compulsory military service, also fascinating. Cynthia Enloe talked about post-war Iraq and post-wars going back to the First World War and how feminists need to intervene in these situations and in how the stories are told. She produced the quote of the conference in my estimation: ‘Widows make people very nervous.’ Too bloody right they do, you should see what they’re doing in Iran.

'And What Else?'
Some papers were very esoteric, exploring much chewy, involved, quite abstract theory, others were more like discussions of a much bigger research project. It provided an immensely diverse overview of feminism at work in the academy and of feminists, in every imaginable discipline, bringing their feminism to scrutinise and - in the case of IR in particular – almost reinvent it. One of the most imaginative and highly successful strands to this event was the part played by artists and some students from Gray’s School of Art, who curated a show of their work. An artist called Merlyn Riggs was doing participatory work. We all had to bring something which was indicative of us and she photographed the things for 'The Museum of Me'. She introduced the work saying, 'My work is about 'Me, Meals, and Menopause,' -(she was responsible for the cheescake recipes). She's also been working with women in a drop in centre and with women in the Sottish Parliament. Alex Brew, another of the artists, has been working with images of men,'Why don't women objectify men?' she asked. She's written an excellent piece for The F Word which is linked to her website, here.

Mixing It Up
It would be truly revolutionary to see planets art, craft and, especially, ceramics, following suit. Unfortunately ‘interdisciplinary’ on planet craft just means including different media, for example textile art mixing with digital media, which you might think was part of how textile/fibre art was developing in digital times anyway, but apparently this counts as interdisciplinary. Not in my book it doesn’t. That’s just visual art behaving as it should. The Crafts Council is consulting on good practice in the crafts, fostering ambition, that sort of thing. I’d suggest this was an excellent example of good practice I’d like to see imported into craft practices.

'Now What?'
Conferences are an extraordinary opportunity to listen to things we don’t normally listen to and meet people we wouldn’t normally meet, this one particularly so because of its interdisciplinary element. Academic departments are often entirely separate from one another, even within a single university, which limits the spread of knowledge because people can’t easily learn from each other. A truly interdisciplinary event such as this can capitalise on the broad dissemination of research which results from the mix and make a real contribution to the building and sustaining of knowledge in that it brings new ways of understanding the issues that arise within our own disciplines. I want to encourage the visual arts and craft institutions that I’m involved with to be much more interdisciplinary in their approach particularly to the dissemination of our work and research. Neither academia nor the art/craft world are particularly well disposed to this kind of interdisciplinary high-jinks, and this conference was an object lesson in how to do it.