WIN AN ORIGINAL INK DRAWING..

 

Every Print Purchase from   https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/category/reproductions   qualifies for the opportunity to win 'Beehives (in Blue)' ORIGINAL Drawing shown in the photograph. Unframed. Sized 23.4 x 33.1 inches on Snowden Cartridge.

The draw will take place on April 5th 2024 at opening of the 'Terra - Exhibition' at The Potter's Club.

With EACH PRINT (automatically Two entries with the 2 for 1 print offer), a ticket reference number will be issued and sent to you with the purchase. The reference will be logged along with your name and address until the draw is made.

The winning ticket reference number will be announced on Twitter and on the website.
You do not have to get in touch if you have won: the Original Ink Drawing will be sent directly to you.

There is no limitation to the number of prints purchased before 04th April 2024.

If the print/s is/are returned; as is in full accordance with your rights as a consumer within the time period outlined in the Terms ànd Conditions of Sale, for the reasons outlined in the Terms and Conditions of Sale then the reference number will be excluded from the draw accordingly.

There will be no cash substitute, or alternative prize offered in place of the Original Ink Drawing.
 
FREE POSTAGE in the UK, USA & Canada and Europe .. Customs duties might be applicable upon exported prints and is the responsibility of the customer.

Two for One Print offer applicable from February 22nd until April 4th 2024 with code SPRING241 at the Checkout. Any print purchased after this date will not be eligible for the offer or the competition draw.

Competition only applicable in UK, USA & Canada and Europe 

 

Enjoy .. 

Meakins and the Summer.

 

My time at J & G Meakin Eagle Pottery Works (to give it's full and historic name) is a great memory. It was only very brief but it's filed in the memory under 'good times.'  Student days; staying at my folks little new house in Franklyn Street following their recent move back to the UK, and home of Stoke-On-Trent; the family abode back from Polytechnic for the Summer to earn some term time money. I've never really had an job I would call worthy but the best times in work are sometimes a lot simpler than job satisfaction and more about great people. Somehow, as things do, a little gang of us formed in the Meakin fold. For one, a chap from Stoke poly studying sculpture and big into Hendrix named Tristram, as I recall. A long haired chap named Neil who was a full-time Meakins man of myriad jobs around the business who started frighteningly early because he'd got the cleaning contract too! By frighteningly early I mean earlier than me and my starting at Six am which was ungodly for a hippie Art student in the making like me.

Big Chris who wouldn't have looked out of place in Motorhead. Big. Big hair. Big 'tache and biker's jacket adorned with heavy metal trophies; and strangely, in this quite ruffled motley crew of big hair and leather there was a quite lovely young lady. A full time Meakins employee in the role of Quality Selector, who's name most tragically is lost to memory. All that does remain is the memory of her bubbly good humour; award winning smile, fresh faced good looks and mysterious kinship to the smelly club that we must have been.
  My role within Meakins was as basic as could be, and as boring as hell with the clock stopped. In essence, I had to pick up selected ware on a pallet on my trusty pallet truck and transport it from one side of the canal via a series of corridors and lifts,  and over a bridge to the other side of the canal to a constant and loudly vocal and driven roomful of ladies (some wouldn't say that!) fulfilling orders with it - and by the shouting, they were being paid by the piece! They wanted ware piled up before them constantly. Driven, to my tired.
   Such relentlessness was puntuated twice in the day and very much looked forward to it was! Firstly, for the most amazing cooked breakfast I have ever had the privilege to eat- canal side in the morning sunshine to laughter and banter.  Again for a Lunch break, for which I sloped over the road to the company cricket pitch, to lie on the soft manicured grass in the shade of a tree for a lovely snooze. My Dad always said that it was strange how memory never remembers the rainy days and my time at Meakins was Summer in every way as I remember it.  
  At the beginning and at the end of the shift the entire workforce all filed through the reception to stamp our cards in the works clock machine. On the way out, it was company policy that folk could be selected at random to be checked for ware being potentially stolen. Neither clocking in nor out was a lesson in civilised protocol.. that stamp on the clock card is the money! Livelihoods.  I never really thought of it like that at the time because it never particularly bothered me so long as a mark had been made on the card, and that I was the right side of the time, but it was a tumultuous ordeal. Perhaps it was because I was employed there via an agency, as were Chris and Tristram, that no clock stamp for the company was ever going to be contentious. I don't know! 

The clock ground around an everlasting week. The job was in no way unpleasant,  but there was a lot of it.
  Every Friday, on early finish, we walked up to Hanley to collect our pay packets. We walked as the group I named above, first stopping in The Ivy House Pub on Bucknall Road for a pint celebrating the week done! How easily pleased we were.

    In town, after visiting the agency office for more banter with the staff in the office.. and the money of course .. we'd go for a couple in The Market Tavern. 
  On a Friday at the end of the month we'd collectively take a trip to The Highwayman Pub out Cheadle way on the bus .. and club together for a taxi back to Hanley!!

  The Summer passed and on my very last shift I was humorously informed that it was 'company procedure' to be dunked in the canal as a fond farewell. Health & Safety had infiltrated it's way into the workplace by then, so it actually transpired that I was taken into a disused part of the operation to an execution squad style drenching by everyone who'd possibly got a bucket! Did everyone have a bucket? Seemed like it!
  Afterwards we still all walked up to Hanley in the Summertime honoured way ...soaked through and all.

   It all ended there. None of us stayed in touch and it was never repeated. That was the way before social media means we can now all keep connected. A chapter.

  I sometimes wonder what happened to all involved; how their lives panned out. They are out there somewhere and now Meakins has long gone. 

    The beautiful memory. Meakins and the endless Summer.

The significance of walking a City is the real seeing of it: https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/category/sixtownssketchbook

    

Meniscus : Collaboration

    When I arrived at College in 1984 I'd been in the UK Three months.

   I was Sixteen and knew nothing about the UK; nothing except for an idyllic life in Malawi growing up in a life of tennis courts, great friends and private pools, sunshine and a boring school.
  I knew nothing about life. 
  Phil Shallcross was on the streets of Stoke-On-Trent photographing the real beginning of the post-industrial decline in The Six Towns.
  Slum clearances; derelict potbanks, and pit heads rising above the terraced houses of it's employees were the subjects he was processing in the darkroom labs of Newcastle-Under-Lyme College under the tutelage of 'Darkroom Dave' Heath... A tutor we shared in our separate career choices. When Dave knew you had the instinct for photography he pushed you to keep shooting and keep processing, to keep looking for the story that every photograph needs to make it live it's own life. 'The photograph has to the tell the story' was his mantra.
  That's what Phil's photographs do. They are the story. 

  We didn't meet at College. The darkroom at College was common ground to the both of us but we were world's apart and heading in different directions. 

 I was studying painting for 'A' Level.

 A career choice suggested to me by a man in an office in Trinity House, an unloved tower block now long gone, up Hanley. I attended the interview with my Mum and my Gran. It was the new way, the man said.. further education.. the life of the pits was doomed; pottery, dead end.. there was a new future ahead. College.
  And so it was. He saved me from the pits and the dust and I didn't even know it.

 Before I left for the UK my Dad said, 'here's a thing it might be useful to know as you've made your decision to live in the UK; it'll be useful I feel.' 'Son, you come from a working class history.'

  I didn't know what that meant.

   We met through Twitter; neither of us can remember the precise circumstances of striking up a conversation but when we did we got to work pretty quickly, which must be a reflection of a mutual energy that came about with this city as the catalyst.  

  I asked Phil if he'd like to collaborate on the 'inner Geographies' of Edgar Broughton's album, for which I saw a whole new way of visual thinking following an intimation by Edgar himself. The seed of the results came from Edgar, in 'digital paintings' of his he'd shown me. Edgar mentioned 'inner Geographies' which sent my imagination into overdrive. It led to the album design completion beyond the album cover .. 

Buy the album and you'll see ..: https://www.cherryred.co.uk/shop/?filter_artists=edgar-broughton

Anyhow ... attention evolved,  as it always does, to work beyond the horizon. 

Edgar and I have been collaborating for a number of years on the relationship of soundscapes in a backdrop of the mythical landscape. The landscape moved.. into an urbanscape. The post-industrial urbanscape of my grounding; Phil's grounding .. and Edgar's desire of dark sound! 

The results thus far are the smashing together of three bodies of work through a digital marriage made in the furnaces of the gods! 

This will be the work in print; through which the soundscapes can be accessed : https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/product-page/meniscus-book

Looking forward ..

Phil Shallcross : https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/category/phil-shallcross

Edgar Broughton : http://www.edgarbroughton.com/

Soundscape Collaboration in the Landscape :

The Shaman and the Dog Soldier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCPUxLa0o_8

Hedgerow Battle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgnwIyaId98

The Secret Lake

https://ko-fi.com/post/The-Secret-Lake-B0B4HVNFH

The Great Hunt across the Sky

https://ko-fi.com/post/---of-a-Brutal-Fabled-Land-Exhibition-X8X4HVVQ1

The Brutal & Fabled Box :

https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/product-page/brutal-fabled-box

Breaking : Entering

 

Climbing over fences; crawling under gates..
We weren't the first by a long stretch.
Grottos of smashed interiors and graffiti all over the walls.
The Michelangelo's of skateboarding gangs and feral enterprises..
Evidence of historic workaday existences evident!
Leaky roofs and office lakes; cold and no fish.
Filing cabinets full of abandoned paperwork; mugs, kettles.. shoes!!
Plaster molds and smashed pottery by the square yards ... 

Packing crates and dead tape guns ..
Shuttered doors long shuttered for good!
Windows more see-through by the absence of glass.
Cigarette butts and ashtrays. 
Silence.
Spirits of former employment, moved on .. 

The Walking of the City (Part One)

  I’ve always walked across this City. That's always been my viewpoint; I mean, I’ve had lifts in cars or taken taxis, and of course I’ve used the bus - especially when there was a reputable public transport system to speak of, but largely I am a walker. I remember being walked to places across the City by my granddad Lloyd, but more later. 

   The first walk starts at the mid-point in my story, and even here I don't remember it like it was yesterday, it was a long time ago. I lived on Waterloo Street, right opposite The Lord John Russell. My old flat is still there but the pub is gone, remaining only in name and identifying as a block of flats. Out of my bathroom window I could see over the community scout hut to the Rising Sun Pub on Well Street. It's still a proud building and I remember great times. Fraught and lean times, but adventurous times nonetheless. Myriad characters whose names  live on in my mind frequented said establishment. Mad Brian. Babes. Karaoke Ken and more besides. Who knows where they are now and whether they'd be alive, but why wouldn't they be? I am. I never knew where any of them lived specifically, but they’d really have to have clung on as most of the original houses in the neighbourhood have now long gone. 

  At the geographical peak of the neighbourhood, the high rises are still there, face-lifted but solid in their dependable presence overlooking the town. Mad Brian lived in Wellington Court and I know that he jumped to his death from the third floor bathroom window high on a cocktail of methadone and cider, and things I likely don't know about too. 

 When Brian was sitting at the bar of the Rising Sun shouting his speeches to nobody in particular he consistently referred to the formula for the calculation of the speed of gravity. Perhaps we should have seen it coming.

 This area is for another time, a different set of stories. But this neighbourhood is where the walks begin. 

  

 Out my bedroom window was a straight look down Nelson Place with the wreck of Johnson's Hanley Works at the bottom. Frequent were my movements down this street, cutting along the cobbles of Stubbs Lane to Eastman Street; flanked by the terraced streets of Berkeley, Talbot and Pelham, and the western wall of the Hanley Works ruin if I was headed down to my folks house on Franklyn. If I was just going to the 24hr garage on Lichfield Street for fags; skins, milk, munchies or all , I’d cut along Berkeley Street. 

  On the way to my folks I’d cross the single lane bridge over the canal and follow the full length of Eastman flanked by the dual wreckages of Johnson's Trent Works and Johnson's Imperial Works. Walking in the dark shadows of former industrial glories .. In recent years I'd walked this stretch of the canal to get to work at Meakins,  but again, that's another story! 

On occasion I’d join the canal at the bridge and follow it to Lichfield Street, for no particular reason other than a change of landscape, as I remember it. 

  I remember on many an occasion face pressed up to and peering through the window grills to check out what the interiors held. Ghosts and shadows mostly. An overwhelming silence where millions of conversations over hundreds of years took place. Local stories. 

  Three floor high derelict factories of purple black bricks and baby blue window frames and gates. Beyond the gates, the empty works receptions and the dead clock card machines - and adorning the walls, the signs of company orders, directives and and directions to myriad departments across the brick empire. Unforgettable and yet hard pushed to remembrance in the new order of streets and missing streets; bland brick new build and cosmetically planted avenues and closes. User friendly looking and devoid of community and spirit. Ideal for the new non-society. I’ve never seen anybody enter or leave these houses down here. These are the empty streets. 

   Built over the old communities are the new places designed for communities that don't seem to interact or speak to each other. Maybe it's just me but I see it like that now.. or rather, I just don't see it. When these new places are prepared for the construction to then happen, they are invariably boarded off. I remember it well because the large plot of land that lay derelict for many years waiting for a plan invited all manner of speculation as the rats grew bigger and the grass grew taller amidst the strewn bricks. The roads remained mostly still visible which compounded the loss of the terraced houses.  On those boards that keep the development zones shrouded, there is boldy advertised for all to see, the Architects new vision! In the Architect's vision there is always the projection of ‘community’, a crowd walking up a planned thoroughfare, interactive, like they're growing together in this new vision. It's friendly looking, easygoing and of course safe. A new housing utopia ‘like the old days’ .. no conversations taking place over doorsteps being scrubbed though.. the space simply being used, shared and being passed through without any visible worries. 

Then comes another reality. The builders disappear, and the boards with the Architects vision come down and the concept also leaves along with the waste. No such vision will exist here. The plots, it seems, are simply sold on the vision.. and why, when society is known to no longer live that way? Is what we've lost still aspired to, full in the knowledge that we don't think that way anymore? That modern life isn't structured that way any more. The rows of terraced streets that created that life were built by factory owners initially, and then councils for vast communities that all more or less worked in the same place, or factories nearby. The work moved on; communities were fragmented, but we still aspire to what was. Aspiration to a past that cannot be replicated.

  You know all this. 

   In contradiction, these are the spaces where fear is created through the television and the newspapers! 

   You, the new faceless communities-  keep off the streets, get straight into your oversized cars that you've parked on the overbig pavements; don't go out where the imaginary ‘junkies’ and ‘paedo’s’ lurk and scrounge around… don't hang around the places that died before they left the Architects drawing board but which the same Architect used to draw you the utopia of community.

  Feral youths come here to hang and smoke.. people walk their dejected pets to offload wholly domesticated bowels without consideration to others they don't care about of equal apathy.

   I know these places. I know them because I have never owned a car and they are essential knowledge for a pedestrian way from A to a destination of need. I know them because I look for them, they're interesting by their very nature of being the details that were never attended to in the great plan. A hotchpotch of aspiration and ruin. The fringes of the town that folk don't look at. The leftovers from the great plan. The unplanned part of the plan where there was no money for. The underneath.  The life ‘underneath’ is what these places are;  this search for the underneath entered my creative vocabulary long ago when I was on the verge of creating but still looking for the story. The story emerged in this hinterland.  That's the description.. 'the hinterland.'  In a City like Stoke-On-Trent, ceramic manufactories lined the canals because it was the superhighway of it’s day.. and they died here too, still snaking through the urban sprawl; smartened up in places, but, in essence, the new feral places only known to the few. It was those old factories and warehouses stood in their afterlife dereliction that pulled me in .. literally, through the sadly boarded window; under the bent out of shape security gate that invited me to crawl under. The place around the back away from sight that allowed me to climb the fence and get inside. 

  More soon ..

Six Towns Sketchbook: https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/category/sixtownssketchbook

Meniscus : https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/product-page/meniscus-book

'..inner Geographies...'

     It was Edgar who coined the term ‘inner Geographies'... and it instantly struck a chord! 

At the time it was relevant to the continuous thread of the album cover story through the booklet planned to accompanying it. Edgar had sent me a raw track during the album's creation titled ‘Belle of Trevelyan’, and also titled the album ‘Break the Dark’ … by return I sent a response in the form of an idea for a film to accompany the track in which a walk through an ancient forest climaxed with reaching the edge .. breaking the dark, and revealing the vision of a future! But really, ‘inner Geographies' meant so much more to me ‘…an emotional recognition of subliminal feelings created from up through time and along history now attached to a place either real or imagined…’

   I never questioned Edgar how he came to use that expression because I didn't want it to mean anything other than what I felt about it. 

  Edgar’s visual ideas along with my own I submitted into Phil’s ongoing adventures into image editing … and wonderful things happened.. 

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/edgar-broughton-break-the-dark-cd/

There is so much more.. it's just a beginning! 

In Phil’s work I saw our parallel story through a mutual submersion into the post-industrial landscape… and so our work merges here in a shamelessly visual feast that writes a story within a story and then some .. I hear sound..

  'Meniscus' .. a merging of collaborative forces in the realms of post-industry :https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/product-page/meniscus-book ..

Exhibition: Black Streets: Dark Heart at The Potters' Club.

 

'Coalbrookdale by Night' 1801 by Philip de Loutherbourg.
Science Museum.

   If this particular work has come to symbolise the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, is there such a painting that represents the death and subsequent consequences of it? Such a painting if it exists would surely be a very British painting too because broadly speaking the repercussions of that encapsulation in this work spread the world over, and yet 'peace' has come to reign here in a full circle. Gone are town-sized sites of blast furnaces; coke ovens and everything that emanates from them, or indeed feeds them, and redundant are the people who's lives were made and made miserable by whatever particular brand of trade formed an intrisic key to the character of the place by the myriad manufacturing processes unique to it.

  The streets are no less rich in inspiration today's post-industry, and many a feral artist still searches for the essence; the remnants and monuments of former glory in it's decay, despair and neglect, with only fading family stories, scratchings of memory and ghosts for company.     
  These artists now produce the art that future generations will hold onto as this place evolves into bland facades and faceless corporate identities devoid of love in the planning or even a shred of character; symbols of globalism and the decline of community. The losing of our own souls to the future somewhere in the message.

Not all is lost, thankfully, so ..

  Let me shine a light on one such artist in an evening of many talents; all showcasing the joys and the great many things still worth celebrating and shouting about in this famous City;

  Stephen Henshall works plein air on the streets of today producing hugely characterful and wonderfully detailed pen and watercolour drawings worthy of the eye! Without hurry he is presently working toward a publication in mind in the spirit of Neville Malkin's 'A Grand Tour.'
   A book whose individual Architectural stories were serialised weekly in The Evening Sentinel in the 1970's - is once more a route travelled again by Stephen building by landmark across the City  with a refreshing candour proving there's so much life in this old dog of a City!

   There really is so much more if that were not enough, but instead of giving the entire evening away I'll hint at the work of photographer Phil Shallcross.. the poetry of Lindsay Bainbridge, the penmanship of author Dave Proudlove and the writer of a lifetime of words in Reg Crawford..
   All will be present on the night to speak to.

 I'll grab the last paragraph here to say that an ongoing body of work of my own making will also be present amidst the luxurious setting of the infamous British Pottery Manufacturers Federation Club. Affectionately known as The Potters' Club, it offers the highest standards of fine dining and hospitality for miles around and you can follow this link to book your table in the dining room as part of this unique evening: https://www.thepottersclub.co.uk/

  There is private club parking; a full bar service and meals not exclusive to the dining room experience.

Federation House, Station Rd, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 2SA

  I look forward to meeting you .. 

'Backs (Fenton)"

https://www.ianrpearsall.co.uk/