You might wonder what good a festival of clay can do for a city which, for two decades or more, has lurked at the bottom of the European league tables on all the key quality of life indicators – health, education, and jobs. But Clare Wood, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent, insists the event, which has been running since 2009, has had an impact: “Clay isn’t going to solve everything, but it can make more of a contribution than people think,” she asserts. By the end of my tour, I’m inclined to believe her.



Now in its ninth iteration, Wood took on the mantle of directing the Biennial in 2021 – a tough year, in so many ways, not least with our uncertain emergence from the global pandemic. Another challenge was that the roof of the former Spode factory in the city centre was declared unsafe six weeks before opening. Undaunted, the team identified another empty former industrial building (there is no shortage in Stoke!) and they adapted the cellular office spaces in the Goods Yard building to a creative use.

I have been to edition of the Biennial since 2013 when founders Barney Hare Duke and Jeremy Theophilous were still at the helm. What blew me away then – and still does – was the quality of the work. At that point, I had limited appreciation of the scale of artistry and ingenuity that this material had inspired in a then-modest community of artist practitioners; for decades, clay had been overlooked, and relegated to ‘craft’ in an art world that was still deeply hierarchical. The British Ceramics Biennial was and remains a spectacular showcase for that creativity.




But how times have changed in the art world. Clay is now all the rage, with globally celebrated ceramic artists showcased at international galleries and museums – the Hayward Gallery’s 2023 exhibition Strange Clay a case in point. The biggest players in contemporary art, Hauser & Wirth, are now adding high end artisan boutiques showcasing wood, textile, and ceramic treasures at key locations around the world alongside their art galleries. The Craft’s Council’s annual Collect exhibition, which cherry picks the finest international makers of ceramics, jewellery and textiles, has also shot up in prestige, popularity, and price tags.

It seems that the world – or at least the UK – has fallen in love with clay. It’s even now got its own primetime reality TV programme in The Great Pottery Throw Down, eight series and counting inspired by the growth of local and pop-up ceramic studios, and the gifted amateurs who demonstrate the perils and pitfalls of the craft.




The 2013 Biennial was the first to allow exhibitors to return to the cathedral-like China Hall at Spode, whose doors only closed on the last worker in 2008. You may think its demise was decades earlier, with the crumbling state of this once-powerful site of production only enhanced the beauty of the hand-crafted vessels and sculptures displayed under its filth-streaked rooflights, and with many installations riffing off the surrounding theme of fragile structures on the point of collapse.

Until this year, large parts of this factory site had been unsafe for occupation, meaning that all previous Biennials spread their events around the city: the Potteries Museum, the AirSpace Gallery, All Saints Church – the potter’s church – in Hanley, the Wedgewood Museum, and the Spode Museum have all played their part. This helped visitors to get to know the city, showing Stoke as a centre for ceramics and making, but also exposing its ongoing decline, boarded up shopfronts, and crumbling infrastructure.






This year is something of a standout edition. Coinciding with Stoke-on-Trent’s centenary of being awarded city status, the place has also World Craft City since the last Biennial. “That feels really important,” Wood says, “There are only two others in the UK – it feels like there’s been a jump in recognition, thanks to the Biennial.” It’s also special because the Spode Factory is now in sufficient shape to become the venue for all the Biennial’s activities, as well as emerging as an engine for ongoing urban regeneration.

One part of the campus was recently turned into the Potbank Aparthotel with an adjacent and thriving café. Another wing now houses 48 studio spaces for artists and makers. It has also now become home to the British Ceramics Biennial’s team – devoted to far more than just a bi-annual event. They now operate education, workshops, and engagement activities year round from a dedicated education space, Spode Studio, with a visible, on-street presence that also advertises the delights of making.

   

 
And what of the work? Well, it’s up to the usual high standard across the various programmes. The headline programme, Award, comprises an open call to the UK’s leading ceramic artists to propose new work or new directions. Of this year’s 180 applications, ten received funding to realise their proposal, with the makers now awaiting the decision of the Selection Panel to discover who will be chosen as winner, receiving £10,000 and a commission at the next edition of the Biennial. All ten are featured in the factory’s China Hall.

A master of her craft, Kyra Cane, achieves the ultimate symmetry and luminosity in her vessels and glazes. So, it’s all the more striking to see her Challenging Terrain series: three sets of three vessels, each trio comprising one perfect vessel accompanied by two companions revealing the destructive impact of elemental forces, inspired by the impact that global warming and elemental shifts are having on the world around us. For one set, Cane left water in the remaining vessels pre-firing, causing the clay to crack and buckle. In another, the artist took a hammer to two of the pieces, causing ugly-beautiful bulges.




Fernando Casasempere’s practice is to re-use and repurpose clay wherever possible. Here, he has hand-built a series of high sided, square clay trays in which he layers the broken remnants of previous failures from previous decades, naming them Sedimentary Selves. Glazing and firing them in their collaged, semi-ruined state, it is a poetic documentation of the timeline of his creative journey with an arresting presence scattered across the factory floor.

Noor Ali Chagani and Clio Lloyd-Jacob have collaborated on a theme of migration, creating fantastical, precarious, hand-built structures that might be dreamt of as home, especially by someone who has none (an imaginative practice inspired by Ali Chagani’s own migratory journey). Leah Jensen’s usual painstaking process of carved, classical vessels has also been subverted by the idea of housing insecurity. She has carved an uneasy assemblage of terracotta elements – the empty shells of tortoises, bristle-clogged paint brushes, and empty picture frames – to evoke the process of endlessly packing and unpacking the objects and items that make us feel at home.


 

Charlotte Moore’s porcelain, flower-festooned gateway-shaped installation offers us a chilling portal into the flora of the future. Provoked by the 600+ forest fires that have occurred across Cornwall over recent summers, on one side of the threshold she has hand-formed flowers that currently thrive in the region, but having passed through to the other side none of those fragile wildflowers, whose seedbeds are destroyed by repeated burnings, are present – instead, this side of the gateway is festooned with stronger, more invasive species. Though it hadn’t yet been installed on my pre-opening visit, I was told a bespoke scent of burning flora will be released whenever someone walks through from one side to the other.

Daniel Silver has summoned a set of grizzly, visceral heads, hand-formed in clay, and then drizzled with oil paint. He has called it Family (which may or may not go down well with his own). Far simpler, but more painstaking and time-consuming in its realisation, Jane Perryman’s Meadow utilises dyes created from her own rewilding experiment – an acre of heavily polluted arable land she purchased 20 years ago near her home and has since planted with wildflower seeds. Working only with the wild plants that have grown here, Perryman has created an impressive library of natural dyes, here deployed in glazes on a range of bowls. In tones of great delicacy, they range from the palest yellows to deep lilac, while nearby she displays a specific dye and the flower from which it was sourced on a series of wall tiles.




Jo Taylor’s exuberant vessels bring a whole different, saucy vibe. Inspired by a conversation had with a friend about the costume drama Bridgerton being her guilty pleasure, she decided to lean into the romance, orgy of decorative detail, and frissons of desire and dating, Regency style. What resulted was this delightful set of ceramic characters, glazed in lush sorbet tones. Taylor’s (Not) Guilty Pleasures are set off beautifully by the skylight above them, their peep-hole apertures and bodylanguage summon just the right note of wit and decadence.

Alison Rees offers a collection of LOOP: Postcards From the Green Belt – a green-walled room set lined with 400 painted porcelain oblongs, capturing moments from walks around the London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP). Whenever things got too much for them, Wood predicted that her Biennial team might retreat into this porcelain pastoral installation.


 

Finally, Susan Halls has taken an animal motif often used in her work and scaled it up to create large multiplicities of non-specific mammals, turning these animal forms into architecture. The towering structures of grey-toned creatures – all four-legged, but lacking the facial or tail features that might clearly distinguish them – were reminiscent of some ancient, Babylonian palace, while the pale wall friezes carried an equal whiff of antiquity.

The winner of the last Biennial Award, Mella Shaw, returns with a new work, displayed dangling in a damp-smelling, recently repurposed room within the Spode campus. Rare Earth Rising comprises two geometric, clay structures, suspended on wires, and rotating under dramatic, under-sea lighting. Shaw’s work highlights the issue of deep seabed mining for minerals, and the devastating impact on marine life. Some of these minerals, Wood tells us, are actually used in the glazes of the work – Shaw seemingly alarmed at the practice and outcome of the mining, but admitting complicity through using the outcome in her work.




Another key part of the Biennial programme is Fresh Talent, which presents the work of five artists who won the Fresh Talent Prize in 2023 – their reward being a residency with a partner organisation to develop new work. The vibrantly coloured sculptures of Tim Fluck, emerging from a partnership with Stoke’s University of Staffordshire – one of only two UK universities which still offers BA Ceramics, though now combined with product and furniture design – stood out. Blending the forms and colours of sweeties (Liquorice Allsorts, gourmet chocolates, sugared bonbons) with the structural sensibility of Lego, his unlikely architectural assemblages communicate the joy of play. 

There were the usual high quality and variety from this year’s Fresh selection, highlighting 25 early-career artists from the UK and Ireland, chosen from over 380 applicants via an open submission programme. Hannah Fastrich’s work stood out. Having switched from studies at the Architectural Association to a Masters in Ceramics & Glass at the RCA, there is both delight and conceptual depth in her deep, Majorelle Blue clay vessels. Their exteriors are shaped from casts of piles of food, while their gently hollowed interiors invite occupation from something edible or drinkable are set neatly into wire frames, they perch somewhere between furniture and art.

This year, a panel of ten year 8 students from St Peter’s Church of England Academy were invited to take part in the Fresh selection. “We’ve done this for three biennals,” says Wood, “they have to look at all the applications and we support them in understanding the selection process.” It’s all part of the Biennial’s ambitious outreach initiatives, which includes year round engagement with alcohol and drug addiction communities, as well as dementia communities.

Not all the resulting work plays a part in the Biennial exhibition, but Slip Tales was one of the standout community engagement projects this year, involving refugee and asylum communities. “We were looking at the heritage and history of Staffordshire slipware, the history and techniques,” explains Wood. She continues, “We are introducing people new to the city to something that has been absolutely embedded here.” The resulting table, festooned with exhilaratingly characterful ware, embellished in very personal explorations of pattern and text, was both moving and exhilarating.



Playscape, an investigation into the uses of rammed earth for public and inhabitable sculpture, was a promising idea. With a hoped for outcome of creating a new rammed earth play landscape somewhere in the city which lacks playgrounds, artist Sarah Fraser, in collaboration with Tuckey Design Studio, Samsoum Studio, WoodCast Designs, and the University of Staffordshire BA Architecture Students, workshopped ideas for play structures with local schools.

The resulting forms, sitting within the Spode site, seem rather lumpen and lacking delight – not to mention liable to scrape young limbs when they ascend or descend from them. In today’s world, it would be hard to imagine a child being easily tempted away from their iPad or PlayStation to cavort in the ideas, but it did provide a useful learning curve for the teams, and an enjoyable Project Space where visitors can have a go at making their own rammed earth structure, using simple wooden formwork and handfuls of local clay.




Though the benefit of all this concerted creative activity has taken its time to show an impact on the city, there is much more optimism than over previous editions I have attended. The aforementioned refurbishments have been partially funded by Stoke-on-Trent, awarded £10m from the previous government’s Levelling Up scheme. “Some of it has been spent and it’s starting to make a difference,” says Wood of the investment. “The Spode site is really developing and building, there are a lot of creative businesses here now – design and digital agencies,” she adds, before adding evidence “BCCP, an advertising agency, is here.”

The local council, who owns the majority of the land, has appointed Capital and Centric as development partners to take regeneration forward, including proposals for the former Goods Yard. “Things will change significantly over the next two to four years,” says Wood. This is all perhaps down to the power of clay – but, perhaps more importantly, change will be down to its practitioners and advocates.