Totem, of the Clay

This exhibition piece for the Brampton Museum in Newcastle-under-Lyme (Staffordshire) responded to a brief set by the Brampton Museum itself, "What is this place?"

 

The answers came down to community, history and education. I was born of clay. This is my connection to the museum, this and family. 

Totem poles represents symbolic lineage.  My father was born a few minutes walk from the museum building and will have known it well.  Cut down through the bypass tarmac and you'll find his old baby teeth amongst the pot sherds and Bakelite doorknobs. Dig down further and you find the whole history of pots. Read it all the way to Roman Newcastle. Tightly pressed in bands of sediment. Stacked like the towers of sagger, (pot containers), that rose up to fill the bottle ovens of Stoke on Trent. I built this Totem out of thrown saggers opened at the front so you can peek in. Each one represents a main change in the development of North Staffordshire ceramics. An old story goes that when the bottle kilns were fired and flames leaped up from their chimneys a huge fiery dragon  would appear at night as you looked down from higher ground.  The dragons shape formed by where the six towns lay. The white dragon, in Chinese culture also represents family. The top vent contains a nod to my lovely Dad who died when I was 18, (way too young and a soul of Newcastle).