Ex-Factory, Stoke-on-Trent

Ex-Factory was a residency programme in Stoke-on-Trent hosted by AirSpace Gallery, that aimed to provide venues and environments for artistic research. Utilising the disused industrial spaces throughout the city rather than establishing a rural retreat, the project intended to be a public facing, urban project with a strong learning element that built connections to local schools, colleges and communities.

During Stoke-on-Trent’s current transitional phase of redevelopment, vacated properties and brownfield sites provide unique opportunities for new projects. While such spaces still exist, the project aimed to capitalise on their potential, becoming an itinerant presence in the city, moving from venue to venue with each new intake of artists.

The loss of heavy industry - in Stoke-on-Trent’s case - mining, ceramics and steel working, has been experienced nationwide but few cities have struggled as much as Stoke to build a new identity. Even the city’s status has seemed in doubt with its six constituent towns each vying for funding and investment. It was in this environment that the project organisers saw the greatest opportunity for intervention and invention by hosting an international residency

Commissioned by AirSpace Gallery and supported by Arts Council England and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation through Artcity, five invited, internationally acclaimed artists created a new body of work whilst living, working and teaching in the city. Leigh Clarke, Chloe Cooper, Leslie Deere and Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson responded to themes of recognition, authenticity, identity and status and produced new works shown for the first time. The resulting exhibition Ex-Factory, was a group show housed in the disused 3000 square metre Olympus Engineering building on College Road in Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent.

The exhibition had a special opening event, free and open to everyone on 8th November, 2014 from 1pm-4pm, with music and refreshments, where the public got to see the works, meet the artists and also get to see the possibilities for the re-purposing of currently closed and unused ex-factory buildings in the city.

Leigh Clarke’s research into the Bossons factory in Congleton near Stoke-on-Trent has led him to generate works for three rooms. From 1946 to 1996, the Bossons factory manufactured chalkware, hyper-real busts that depicted stereotypical men and women from all over the world. Clarke has paid particular attention to the most common and popular of the busts, namely the Syrian.

W. Ray Bossons trained as an advertiser and publicist before joining the 79th Field Regiment where he became Captain in World War 2. In 1946 he began working with his father (W.H. Bossons) who ran a pottery factory and started the Bossons company which eventually employed 100 women ‘paintresses’ who painted the fine detailing on the chalkware busts that were cast by the male workers.

Clarke is interested in the collectability and acceptance of the bust to a British post-war working class and how, after years of wars, economic corruption and terror campaigns; images of people from these cultures have been demonised through the British media. Clarke has been focusing on collecting Syrian heads from the Internet that he has then stripped back to the chalk beneath the facial detailing.

Clarke has screenprinted the defaced Syrian on 24, 5-metre lengths of red book binding paper. The object appears with other Bossons characters in a defunct storage room and again in an office in the form of 24 of the original defaced busts.

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