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Recording Change – the evolution of the British studio ceramics community

Partington was invited to deliver this 5,000 word paper, Recording Change - the Evolution of the British Studio Ceramics Community, at the prestigious 2013 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale (27-28 September) in Icheon, South Korea in recognition of his work in the oral history of ceramics through the Recording the Crafts archive, developed and curated by Partington at UWE. Building on over ten year’s work conducting and recording interviews with craftspeople, the paper engaged with the conference themes of community and co-existence, employing video and audio recordings from the archive as a unique resource to discuss the changing nature of the studio ceramics community in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century. The paper extended the notion advanced by Portelli that oral historians produce creative narratives of meaning constructed by interviewer and interviewee. The interviewees (such as Bernard Leach, William Newland, Neil Brownsword and Claire Twomey) featured in the selection of videos included as case studies, were filmed talking about their work while creating or handling a piece they had created. As such, the paper argues, they become historians, not just in terms of their recollection of past events, but as creators of meaning about those events. Partington’s aim was not to deliver a comprehensive account but to demonstrate how oral history, through specific methodologies developed for the fruitful interrogation of the recorded texts, can bring practitioners and the ‘eloquence of making’ to the forefront of what is abstractly termed ceramics.

The Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale is the largest event of its kind in the world (http://www.kocef.org/eng/03_biennale/2012/01_01.asp). The paper was published in the conference proceedings GICB 2013 International Ceramic Symposium: Co-existence (2013) in both English and Korean versions.