THINGS TO SEE IN ST AUSTELL

Winners of the 2019 Whitegold International Ceramic Prize are currently working on new artworks that we hope will be on show in central St Austell to coincide with the ‘Window into Whitegold’ virtual event.

Winner of the Quartz award, Neil Brownsword is exploring the entangled histories of St Austell and Stoke-on-Trent and wants to bring the largely unseen working relationships between people, processes and material in the ceramic industry into public view. Through a new installation created for Whitegold 2020 Neil intends to reconnect audiences with the physicality of raw materials, their geological origins and wider cultural contexts as well as the tools and technologies that have been key to the success of both Stoke and St Austell.

Winner of the Feldspar award, Tana West is making a work that draws on china clay country’s rich vein of interactions between the social and the geological. Her proposal is inspired by wallpaper depicting the Bay of Naples that hung in the White Hart Hotel in St Austell when it opened in 1822 and was later donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1930’s by St Austell Brewery. This wallpaper by Dufour and Sons, was a positive reflection of the prosperity and global links of the early traders in china clay. Through experimentation with paperclay created using waste materials from china clay extraction and using local stories and imagery, Tana aims to construct a circular panorama with 15 panels depicting St Austell’s clay country.