haptic/tacit Spode Works for the British Ceramics Biennial 2021

This project echoes a group residency, haptic/tacit founding members took part in alongside other makers, from the Crafts Council Hothouse scheme for emerging practices during the 2013 British Ceramics Biennial programme.

The Spode Works site has continued to have creative resonance particularly the architecture and ideas involving space and place. Becoming a recurring theme and it is through that lens that we approach this project, viewing the site in aesthetic, visual and phenomenological terms. Responding to its fabric and the material qualities of its buildings and construction, picking up on observed details and juxtapositions or dealing with a sense of the space itself.

For this project we have invited Dan Southward, photographer and ACAVA studio resident and, in keeping to the spirit of the original residency as emerging makers, three recent graduates to join in creating new work and new viewpoints onto the Spode Works.

Having observed the Spode site for the British Ceramics Biennial in 2013 what immediately fascinated Kim was the quiet that hangs in the air in a space devoid of its former daily rhythm. What comes from that stillness is the tenacity of the natural elements beginning to infiltrate and slowly seep through the brickwork.

Where water-marks appear and disappear leaving evidence of momentarily being present and revealing the passing of time within spaces that are relatively undisturbed.

‘Water alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, it carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still.‘

(from Leonardo da Vinci Codex Leicester)