A Research Residency at West Dean

I have just spent the week on a research residency at West Dean College in Sussex. Which is a school of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation. I guess a research residency can be anything, but for me it meant spending the week wandering around the school, speaking with tutors and students on courses like Fine Art, Instrument Making, Art & Contemporary Craft, Ceramics & Furniture Conservation. I was trying to speak with as many people as possible about what drew them to a certain craft, and what they were responding to within that material or process. As well as looking for the similarities and differences across the disciplines in the way they each thought about materials. While I was there I wrote a diary each day reflecting on some of the conversations I had, and I've combined some of those thoughts and conversations here.

While on a walk one day I poked my head through the door of The Forge where around 8 people were bashing red hot metal fresh out of the fire. Caught lurking I was invited inside, and within a few seconds I was hearing all about what the students were making, and how the metal becomes easier to work with when it’s hot.

The tutor started learning blacksmithing at age 17. He felt the craft had fallen out of fashion because people see it as being stuck in the past. But he was making contemporary sculptures with blacksmithing techniques, and hoped to share this passion with more people.

Across all of the courses, I spoke to people with a genuine interest in sharing knowledge. Many students were studying for up to 6 years, and tutors had spent whole careers committed to one process, getting to know a very small number of materials intimately.

As part of the residency, I ate all my meals in the college dining room, meeting people who were there to study or do a short course in glass, watercolours or embroidery etc. On my first dinner I ended up sitting with two Restorers who were staying the night at West Dean while recording an episode for The BBC’s Repair Shop which films down the road. After telling them about my research project they began talking excitedly about the materials they work with as restorers.. how one of them could tell where on the body of an animal a piece of old leather had come from.

The full-time artists were away on a trip for a lot of my visit so I spent a lot of time talking to the Conservation students. A watch conservator told me he preferred watches to clocks because watches spend a lifetime close to a person, on a wrist or in their pocket. Whereas clocks were more detached, domestic objects. The main part of his job he said was to stabilize materials, slowing corrosion and rust, making them safe for display, but that to a conservator the balance of where to stop was important. I asked him about the worst condition of a watch he’d ever seen, and he told me about a watch in the British Museums collection which had been rescued from the Thames.. They had stabilized the materials but had done little to the appearance of the watch, so all of that history of time spent washed onto the banks of the Thames was still visible. He described how although the watch had been hidden and out of sight for all those years, it had never left London.

This deep respect for how materials show us the history of objects was present across all the conservation departments, and I became enamoured with the language they used.. One ceramics conservator pulled out a box of broken, soot-covered ceramic fragments that had been destroyed during a fire in a Palladian mansion. And they described how they planned to ‘honour the fire’ throughout the conservation process.

That same ceramic conservator told me they all take weekly pottery lessons so they can understand how ceramic objects are made, and in fact many of the students were also makers and practicing ceramicists outside of their studies. Showing me a piece of an archaeological pot, that was so porous that most adhesives would seep into the material and stain the surface, I said it felt so scienctific. She laughed and said that for her she never thought about it as learning the science because it was never about looking in a text book or understanding chemical formulas, instead the knowledge came from repeatedly experiencing how these materials interact with each until eventually she understood the characteristics of different materials.

On my final day when some of the artists were back from their trip, I led a group session where they each brought a material that they were working with. We sat and discussed what qualities attracted them to those materials. One artist spoke about plant fibres having untamable elements, and a loud voice that they wanted to be present in the work. How they weren’t at all interested in coercing or forcing a material to behave a certain way. Someone else said at times they love the immediacy, the smell, and messiness of clay, but mixing in certain waxes or oils can make it sticky, sludgy and awful. One person wanted to be more removed from their material and preferred to cast with resin. People described the process they were working with as comforting, uncertain, intriguing. Natural materials have unique personalities. Wool is stiffer than the acrylic stuff and it's less forgiving. For one artist they were captivated by having the responsiveness to touch which meant they had to be completely in tune with their material, and if they push it too far it could be ruined.

There was a sense of freedom in the way the artists wanted to be surprised by materials. Not employing them for a purpose but trying to open a dialogue with them. The conservators had a less flexible set of criteria, as they could damage an object if they mistakenly combined two wrong materials. On the other hand though, the conservators were deeply in tune with the very active lives of materials.. The objects and artworks they are met with have lived in the world, reacting to environmental changes and coming into contact with other elements. These materials have taken on a life of their own - with pigments fading, varnish discolouring, wood warping, rotting & moulding. The clock conservators needed to understand the complexity of metals, but also of the unwanted material processes of rust, corrosion and verdigris growing and protruding.

The residency mainly left me thinking how people are so different, and one way to spot this is in how the qualities and characteristics of materials draw different people in, and keep them coming back to the studio or workshop every day.

The art historian James Elkins describes how: “Instead of learning words, [artists] learn substances. Long years spent in the studio can make a person into a treasury of nearly incommunicable knowledge about the powderiness of pastels, or the woody feel of different marbles, or the infinitesimally different iridescences of ceramic glazes”. End quote.. This definitely applies to the makers and conservators I met as well.