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1479 Plates: Crafting Collaboration

This paper focuses on collaborative working methods developed in creating the public artwork, ‘1497 Plates’, commissioned by Bath and North East Somerset Council to commemorate the Combe Down Stone Mines Stabilisation project and exhibited at The Octagon, Bath (2009). The 9m x 6m wall of dinner plates was digitally designed by Bunnell and artist Chris Tipping and produced by Digital Ceramic Systems in Stoke on Trent.

A map, displayed on 788 bone china plates, explores the relationship between present day engineering and mining technology, stone mines heritage, natural history, and two 18th C. entrepreneurs Ralph Allen and Josiah Wedgwood. 691 households affected by the stabilisation works were gifted a ceramic plate from the map to represent the symbiosis of the household and the mining world underneath.

The writing reports the artists’ collaborative methods developing and realising the final design within a digital milieu. Tipping’s concept emphasised the layering of digital data from geological surveys and ordinance survey, and derived hand drawn elements from archaeological finds and mining’s cultural influence in the Combe Down. The digital design process involved testing and developing methods for achieving a rich and coherent visual language for Tipping’s map, meeting the technical demands of working on this vast scale and creating individual high resolution files for high quality ceramic tableware. The paper evidences the potential for digital technologies to enable the large scale production of one-off ceramics in collaborative contexts that involve dialogue, narrative and interaction with a range of project stakeholders.

The project features in Lord, F (2010), The Stabilisation of Combe Down Stone Mines: the saving of a village, BathNES Council ISBN 978-0-09563829-3-4, and Shillito, A (2013) Digital Crafts: Industrial Technologies for Applied Artists and Designer Makers. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, ISBN 978-1408127773.