Neil Brownsword

Neil Brownsword is a Professor in Ceramics at Bucks New University and Visiting Professor in Clay and Ceramics at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. For over a decade Neil Brownsword’s artistic practice has remained a potent form of recording historic change in North Staffordshire. His exploration of post-industrial landscape as a raw material has renegotiated the region’s associated socio-economic histories and production infrastructure through a variety of perspectives and practices. Brownsword unearths/ salvages by-products from the histories ceramic production and regenerates these vestiges of labour into abstract assemblages and installations. Brownsword’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Yingee Ceramic Museum, Taiwan and the Korean Ceramic Foundation. In 2009 he was awarded the ‘One Off Award’ at the inaugural British Ceramic Biennial, and in 2015 the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi Ceramic Biennale 2015, South Korea.

• Staffordshire centre of production in the UK.
• Ancestors in pottery industry.
• 16 - apprentice.
• 18th - 19th century pottery: interested in.
• Made fragments: subversion of modern day?
• The once common place objects.
• Waste products from industry.
• 80 hours of raw footage, 2003: labour and skills.
• Salvaged residual clay of products.
• High craft and demolition
• Last 3 weeks of potter who trained him (2003).
• Reversed Chinese copy on itself: Recreations.

David Toop

• Immersion in relation to sound.
• Making the intangible tangible.
• Cassettes: Borrowed sounds from 10' discs, from BBC etc.
• Ocean of sound 1985: No splitting of genres.
• Where art happens includes how art happens - Don't talk much about how art happens.
• Didn't see the point of releasing an album in the 21st century.
• Drawing became important again, marks made, loves drawing materials.
• Drawing: urge to throw away - mark is permanent sound is fleeting (if you don't like it, it is already gone).
• Created "action drawings", more interesting to him.
• Representation of listening in still media.
• Talked about: Gabon -Voice of Ya Mwei 1968: masked voice, is his brew used to make guttural noises a musical instrument?
• Most of his work is self created sounds and editing them digitally.
• Used vibration noises on carbon paper to make drawings.
• Moved on to tissue paper.
• Many private concerts: Tissue paper, marks as a language.