Stories Beneath the Surface - Session Four
We started the day at the V&A Wedgwood collection and the curator took us around some of the exhibitions. We were told how the Wedgwood company had a £134 million pension debt and how they had originally planned to sell off the artefacts in the museum to fund it. The Art Fund stepped in and managed to fundraise to buy the collection off Wedgwood and then gifted it to the V&A to run the museum.
The museum had recently received funding for a project to engage with the public about racism. Josiah Wedgwood was extremely outspoken on issues of slavery and was an abolitionist. In 1787, he created an anti-slavery medallion in jasperware for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. This organisation campaigned against the atrocities committed by British enslavers who forcibly transported 3.8 million enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas. Thousands of the medallions were distributed for free; similar to protest badges of today. Wedgwood’s children continued the campaign after his death and eventually saw slavery abolished in British colonies in 1834. A fact we were told has stuck with me; emancipated persons received nothing whereas slave owners were financially compensated for their loss of income and it took the British government until 2015 to pay off all the debts to enslaver families, worth £17 billion in today’s money. I couldn’t believe that in my lifetime we were paying that debt off.
The Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion depicts a Black half-naked man kneeling with his chained hands raised. Above him are the words, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ The museum was tasked with re-examining this iconic object with the help of local communities, finding out what the object meant to them. With a group of Sixth Form students, the medallion was examined and reinterpretted with the aim of creating a medallion for the 21st century.
“The strands of history, art and allyship were woven together throughout the week to equip the students with the tools they needed to interrogate the medallion, its purpose and iconography. The result was a thoughtful and creative design process, considering what a protest medallion should look like today.” - Kate Turner
The final design shows the recognisable fist motif emerging out of the iconic Stoke-on-Trent bottle kilns and plays with the wording from the original 1787 medallion, making it a statement rather than a question.
It looked like a very engaging and meaningful project. We were asked to look at how it was displayed and what we would change if we were curating the exhibition. The curator had said that it had been a mammoth task taking over the collection and that it would take years for them to slowly change the displays. A few of us were a little disappointed with the space that had been given to the project. It was as if it had been crammed into a glass cabinet between two other exhibits, one being two portraits of Josiah and his wife which the visitors had already seen three times earlier in the exhibition. As a visitor you could have easily missed it which is ashame due to the nature of the exploration of the object and the local communities reimagining of it.
We then got to look at the archives which were absolutely amazing. Temperature controlled rooms with metal bookcases all filled with books; some pattern books, some order books and even handwritten letters received and written by Josiah Wedgwood. They contain so many hidden histories as they haven’t all been read yet. They are slowly trying to get some of the archive online but it is a massive task.
We continued our day in Stoke-on-Trent with a visit to the Spode museum. It is run by a trust, set up in 1987 as an independent charitable trust which the Spode company donated its collection and archive to, in order to protect them in perpetuity against possible future changes of ownership or commercial downfalls. This seemed to be very fortunate as the company closed in 2008 but the collection was already safe. The collection and archive span over 200 years, including over 40,000 ceramic items. The Spode company had never moved from its original location so everything was kept-over 25,000 engraved copper plates, antique factory tools, machinery, moulds and ¼ million Spode and Copeland documents. It seems the museum has not had comparable funding to Wedgwood but the importance of the collections and buildings are really evident. The local council have taken on the buildings and some are being converted into apartments. The trust is concerned that some of the history is going to be lost. You couldn’t help but feel concerned for the future of the Spode museum as they don’t own the building and are at the mercy of volunteers giving up their free time to continue the trust's work.
Because of the considerable time span covered and the near completeness of the archive, this enables a very unique insight into the history of a world famous ceramic factory from the Industrial Revolution to the present day, information on its owners and employees and its relevance to the community of Stoke. We spoke with two former employees, one was an engraver and described the full process.
We then visited the Stoke museum run by the local authority, they have an extensive ceramic collection. I even found some Buckley pots there. There was loads to see from antique ceramics to a large collection of contemporary artwork. From there, we went next door to the local library that contains the local archive. They are also looking after the documents from Spode and Copeland for the trust. We handled some old books from Spode and were able to see how they have been digitising their archive.
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