Rachel Grant

Godiva Awakes

2012-02-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

For over a year now I have been working on the exciting 2012 Cultural Olympiad project 'Godiva Awakes' with the Coventry based company Imagineer Productions. You can read more about that here Godiva Awakes

I am part of the Coat Team designing and creating the coat for a ten metre high Godiva, working under lead artist Julia O'Connell and with a team of another three textile artists and a glass artist.
In preparation for designing the coat each artist has researched a specific industry from around the West Midlands. Being based in Stoke-on-Trent the pottery industry was an obvious choice for me and I was particularly interested in the women of the Potteries.

The great female designers Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff became a focal point of my research but equally I was interested in the everyday woman in the industry. The paintresses, the office clerks, the glazers and fettlers. The kind of women who worked long hours in the factory and returned home to children and husbands to feed and clean up after. Some of these women were unlucky enough to do these jobs before the public health acts of the late 1800's and were exposed to lead and dust that caused Silicosis, commonly named 'Potters Rot'.

In the 1920's ceramic designers Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff established role models for women of the Potteries to aspire to. Their stories suggested that women no longer had to conform to the pre-defined notions of gender or even social status within the Pottery industry, or to consider their creative endeavours in the industry to be of lesser importance than their domestic role within the home.

The final designs for my sections of Godiva's coat are to be an amalgamation of all the roles and influences on women throughout the Potteries history.
Beautiful surface patterns inspired by art deco designs, repeated circles suggesting the thousands of plates that would pass through workers hands every day, domestic chores that must have been running through their minds daily and the secret affairs of the heart and soul that form the core of our humanity whether a poorly paid paintress or a company art director who’s become a household name like Clarice Cliff.

Whilst carrying out my early research, I collected ‘visual fragments’ of my findings in a sketchbook.

These fragments of text, images and photographs aim to illustrate the disparity between the raw process of pottery production and the polished product that is presented at the end. I have used these collections of fragments in my final designs as a metaphor for the barriers to aspiration that existed in the Potteries past.
By layering fragments one over another, abstracting shapes, designs, stories and facts, I hope to establish these as layers of history, no longer disparate but united in memory. A solid ground to build on for a fairer and more equal future. A future that strives to raise aspirations above and beyond our industrial past.

Every day the Godiva Awakes twitter feed posts a photo of the day and today they chose a section of a sample from my coat designs you can see it here: GODIVA IMAGES

It's a really exciting project to be part of and such a joy to work on so I'm sure I'll be posting a lot more about it here soon.

Image Above: Digital sketchbook page.
(Copyright Rachel Grant)

A visitor to the studio....

2012-01-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

Having taken a few weeks off between my Poland trip and the Christmas fun that is the school holidays I was totally ready to see in the New Year with a clear out in the studio. I LOVE having a good tidy up and a de-clutter it's always so cathartic to fill a load of bin bags and have a good re-organisation. I find neat organised boxes a joy to be honest!!!! This year's studio clean up was made all the more appealing with the knowledge that Deborah from Dappled Sky was going to be coming to visit the studio in the New Year to interview me and my partner, artist Paine Proffitt (who also works under the name Nicholas Hudson Paine)about our work, our rather humble studio space and what it's like to share this space with each other.
So I tidied up my shelves and my desk area....and Paine kinda tidied his....in a kind of male way....but hey it was a tidy up all the same!!!! Our afternoon with Deborah was just lovely, we rarely have visitors....possibly because if we did we'd have to tidy up more.....but it was interesting to talk to her and then most interesting to read her write up of our interview. Reading someonelses' interpretation of your life is a strange sensation and gives you an interesting perspective, almost like stepping out of yourself and looking in. It was a good experience to have at the beginning of the year as it helped me to re-align myself with my practice and prepare my mind for the coming year of busy creativity I have ahead.
You can read the Dappled Sky interview here and yes, that really is the tidy version of the studio!!!!

Image: Deborah Nicklin/DappledSky

Home and Overwhelmed.

2011-12-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'm home from the most amazing trip to Warsaw where I saw amazing things and met amazing people. There was so much to take in and I feel like I'm still processing it now. We visited many projects in and around the city all very different but each one having people and communities at the heart of them. I learnt a lot about process, about the diverse ways in which people can make a difference to communities. I also learnt that I love Poland and am desperate to go back again. But I am also exhausted and feel like I need to sleep for three weeks to get over the trip but I have been reliably informed that it is nearly Christmas and I have a whole lotta work to do before it!
Here are just a couple of photos from my trip......

Count Down To Warsaw

2011-11-21T03:11:00.000-08:00

Well this time next week I'll be at Warsaw University getting to know the people I will be sharing and conversing with for seven days as part of the project 'Localise'.
Localise is a programme that I have got involved with via the Creative Communities Unit at Staffordshire University and brings together a range of people working in or studying participatory arts here in the UK, Poland and Lithuania. There have been two hosted visits already that I wasn't involved in, one here in Stoke-on-Trent and one in Lithuania.
Over the previous few weeks I have been meeting with my fellow travellers(there are six of us in total) to discuss the study trip and the various pieces of reading that we have undertaken in preparation for the visit. It has been really interesting to read different approaches to participatory arts, or as they call it in Poland 'Culture Animation', and to learn more about the history of Polish culture. We have been putting together some collective lines of enquiry to explore during our visit and one that particularly interests me at the moment, not just in connection with Polish practice is,

"How is the Artist supported within Culture Animation in order that their own personal creativity is nurtured and developed alongside that of their participants?"

During my latest residency Growing Hearts and Minds that I completed just a few weeks ago, there was a professional development day included for all the artists who had been commissioned on the programme. During this day we talked and shared about our practices, our relationship to the project and our experiences of working with people. While we did this we worked with the artist Simon Ripley, to create personal prints about our thoughts and discussions. One of the things we discussed was, in essence, the same as the above question, how as artists who regularly 'give' to other people in a participatory sense, nurture and develop their own creativity?

I feel I'm quite privileged in that I am, for the majority of the time, able to find a balance in my practice between working with people and working with myself! However I think this is an issue that's frequently hidden or not talked about in participatory work for fear that it doesn't quite fit into the altruistic nature of participatory culture!

I was pleased to read in a recent interview with the well known community artists The Cultural Sisters that they hold a firm policy of artist's development and training, acknowledging the need to keep finding new skills, new inspiration and taking the time(and sometimes money) to include that in their programme. You can read the interview at Dappled Sky . I think this is a good approach to take and important for artists who spend a large part, or all of their practice in developing other people.

Back to the beginning...

2011-11-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

Well it's been a long time since I had a blog....about three years I think....I shut my last one down partly because I'd had some big life changes happen and quite honestly I didn't want to see a reminder of my previous daily life and partly because it was becoming waaaaay too much work to keep up with it.
Since then I discovered Facebook and now bore my 'friends', many of whom I don't know all that well, with my daily crap about what I'm looking at right now, what I want to see, what music I'm loving blah, blah, blah....I'll be honest....I subject them to a lot. SO in order to spare them EVERY inch of my tiny mind I decided to begin the blog again and get it out of my system, kind of throw it out there for everybody or nobody to read. So to start with I make art, I do projects with people and I generally lead quite a creative life...it's pretty good....but alongside that stuff I also do other things and have other interests and I may from time to time include those in this blog....or maybe not....we'll see...my life can be quite odd and random....here is me measuring a tree for my last project.....who knows what I'll be doing for the next....more soon I guess...