A dinner service

Charlotte Hodes's residencies include a series of Artist Placements at Spode, a ceramic factory in Stoke-On-Trent, Staffordshire between 1998 - 2004, where Hodes had unprecedented access to the Spode archives of pattern books and copper engraved transfers. She used these to create her own 'visual bank' which she then re-interpreted onto existing Spode ware.

'A Dinner Service' was a project in partnership with West Midlands Arts, Spode and The Potteries Museum Staffordshire for which she produced 3 unique dinner services. The research questioned how it was possible to use the form of the dinner service to make a contemporary installation.

"While the form of the dinner service has been used before, for example, in Judy Chicago’s seminal work 'The Dinner Party' (1996), my approach was to use existing factory ware onto which I collaged fragments from Spode’s archive of patterns, an existing body of imagery, which I both celebrated and subverted. My procedure followed traditional factory processes in all but one way, which was my deconstruction of transfers from the archive through my working method of collage. This enabled a process of re presenting familiar imagery, such as the pattern Italian Blue, which acknowledged a tradition whilst appropriating it to construct imagery with a contemporary resonance."
One of the dinner service was purchased for the permanent collection of the Potteries Museum.

Related conference paper: http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/challengingcraft/ChallengingCraft/indexofpapers/hybridprac.htm