The Road to Chatcull

 The road to Chatcull  

     

By Reg Crawford.    Twitter: @regcrawford3

Many thanks to Ian Pearsall for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the book and the concept of the #TERRA exhibition. The road here has been both interesting and frustrating as the pandemic intervened in the process of Ian’s paintings reaching a wider audience with planned shows in Scotland and elsewhere cancelled. Despite that interruption, it is good to hear that there is a rapidly growing international market developing for his bold and dynamic paintings. This show is an opportunity for the local community, and hopefully many others from further afield, to see a comprehensive showcase of Ian’s latest work. 

With the move to Maer, a very different, exciting new chapter has begun for Ian. The fantastic new subject matter provided by the North West Staffordshire landscape. The paintings in this exhibition show his eye for intriguing sight lines coupled to the dynamic light & shade that reveals the contours of this landscape of low hills, richly corrugated ploughed fields and isolated buildings. 

 I first had dialogue with Ian and Lindsay via Twitter, finally meeting up at the #SCAR From the Rich Earth Exhibition which was held in the stylish new Valentine Clays building in Fenton. Since then, I have written a few articles about Ian’s work and how its dynamic focus inspires so many people. Like most who come into contact with his paintings, I believe Ian’s work is a powerful, individual and poetic interpretation of landscape – rural as well as urban. This statement, in my personal view, applies pretty much to his entire oeuvre; from the bright, African Fish Eagle screaming works showing the hot colours of his childhood home in Malawi, to the dark streets, terraces and industry of The Potteries, the high drama of the big skies of the Rhinns of Galloway and now the dynamic perspectives of the land around Maer. 

Given the unfathomable vastness of Terra / Earth as a subject and my predilection and indeed preference for the smaller localish scale when it comes to landscapes, I have, with Ian’s blessing put together what is essentially a riff, a very personal, whimsical piece, specifically about this fascinating corner of North West Staffordshire. It is not an academic document nor is it, in any sense, written from an expert’s point of view on any of the subjects discussed. I wrote it because I am intrigued by this humble corner of Staffordshire and have tried to find out a bit more about it. Please note that any mistakes contained herein are mine and mine alone. If you can add stories, facts or corrections to this article, please contact me via Twitter @regcrawford3 

The title, ‘The Road to Chatcull’ came to me when I was researching the etymology and history of the place names of this part of the world. To me, it is such an interesting and poetic name. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086) where it is described as ‘waste’ having ‘land for one plough.’ The prefix Chat probably comes from the pre Norman Conquest, Old English personal name ‘Ceadd’ or its variant ‘Ceadda’ – pronounced ‘Chad’. It’s a name that could possibly have been used in this region anytime between the mid-5th to mid-7th Century and up to the mid-11th.  Likewise, the suffix ‘cull’ possibly derives from the Old English word ‘culne’ – meaning a kiln. Given the use of burnt lime as a fertiliser applied to the land during the Anglo Saxon period, this could possibly be a lime kiln. That is by no means certain and the kiln or kilns may have been for the firing of pots. It would be interesting to investigate this further, both via documents in the County Records and in the field to see if there is any extant, surviving archaeology in the area, associated with lime / chalk burning. 

Walking the road from Maer to Chatcull you sense that it is paved with the stories of thousands of years of impact made by people on the rich red soil in the surrounding fields. None can tell who those, now shadowy people were. Some, from the recent past, we know from documents and even photographs, left buildings, churches, field systems and woodland that we are still living with. As we get further back in time, the veil between us and the past becomes ever more opaque. Documents are few and far between, eventually tailing away into nonexistence. What were once the bodies of real people become soil shadows, their remains dissolved in the acidic clayey soils of the area. Even their household pottery together with bronze, iron and stone tools, lie buried, unseen and broken, sometimes deliberately, beyond recognition. There are no written records from prehistory, a few Iron Age coins, pot sherds and Mesolithic flint tools are found. There will be more, somewhere for sure.    

Before Ian and Lindsay moved to Maer from The Potteries, and despite living for seven decades only a few miles away in South Cheshire, I had never been to the area I am writing about. The nearest I got was, during several summers in the mid-1960s, when I worked during the school holidays for a forestry contractor who had planted conifers on the Maer Hills. The firm had a maintenance contract for the young woodland and I spent days every summer with a workmate, knocking down dense bracken with a brushing hook and running away from angry wasps whose nests we had disturbed. I also helped plant 65 acres of trees in what is now Whitmore Wood.

At the time, the land, which is by the side of the railway line immediately south of Whitmore village, was owned by the Mainwaring family, whose patrician elders occasionally dropped in to provide advice to us youngsters on the best drinks to have in your flask to quench your thirst during the interminably long hot working days of those 60s summers. Cold tea is the thing apparently. A more interesting diversion was provided by the pest controller who was contracted to rid the plantation of the rabbits that had burrowed under the wire netting fence and set up vast warrens. Breeding colonies fuelled by the calorific and tasty Lodgepole and Corsican pine saplings which we had planted on the deep ploughed red soil. He used to arrive for work on his Royal Enfield motor bike, on the petrol tank of which sat a savage Jack Russell who was not much bigger than a rabbit himself. How the dog remained in place as the old bike thundered across the Staffordshire countryside remains a mystery. Like the Lone Ranger, where he came from no one knew. There was little traffic in that area in those days and the ‘millionaire’s row’ of large houses in the woods were only just starting to appear as the land agent sold off the plots for building at what was rumoured to be £1,000 an acre. A price at the time thought to be only affordable by wealthy industrialists and stockbrokers from the distant cities. The presence of the pest controller brightened up our days considerably. Dressed not in the mode du jour of military camouflage and netting over the face, he wore an old jacket and flat cap, as crash helmets were not compulsory in those days. To be fair, from a distance he looked like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, except he didn’t have a Triumph. His MO was to gun the low slung 500cc Enfield up the little lane from Whitmore, over the cattle grid and on a bit, parking behind my boss’s Vauxhall Cresta estate. In addition to the dog, he came armed to the teeth. On his back he carried a .410 shotgun. In the bags on the parcel rack were nets and we also had a big tin of Cymag, a presumably now illegal, cyanide gas producing powder. Cymag was used as a last resort. It was administered using a table spoon lashed with binder twine to a 5 foot long bamboo cane. The powder was left at the entrance to the burrows. When it got damp, the deadly gas was produced and bye bye bunnies.

So much for the memories. My first visit to Maer, over 50 years later, was in June 2021. It turned out to be something of a revelation. I drove in off the A51 at Stableford and set about exploring the lanes. I criss crossed the area bounded by the Maer Hills and the Millmeece valley to Chatcull. One thing that struck me that day was that the approach to Maer village from the A51 through the ‘tunnel’ is as dramatic and picturesque as any I have seen here or abroad. I eventually stopped by the side of Chapel Chorlton Common and its enigmatic Oak tree planted in the middle of the green to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. 

Since that initial visit in June, I’ve been able to spend some time on the patch, soaking up its atmosphere and looking for the stories buried beneath the topsoil and enjoying the lines on the land, the result of centuries of human intervention, but still largely dependent on the bedrock and geology of the vanished landscapes buried beneath the fertile red soil. 

To get to the core, the heart of all landscapes, demands that time is spent immersed in them, physically visiting and experiencing their light and shade, their flora and fauna, day and night. Ideally, visits need to be made through the year and in all seasons and weathers. Unfortunately, that has not, so far, been possible to achieve. However, here are my thoughts of what I have found so far.

Landscapes around the world pretty much comprise a thin top layer on a vastly older layer cake of the remains of past cultures, vegetation and farming methods. In most cases, these layers have been remorselessly and relentlessly crushed, dissolved and ploughed out of existence. The Maer area is no exception. Officially designated as sandstone hills and heaths overtopped by slightly acid loamy soils with impeded drainage, bounded to the east, in the valley of the Meece Brook, by loamy and clayey floodplain soils with naturally high groundwater. Predominantly an agricultural landscape, the area features, for the most part, medium sized fields used for rearing dairy and beef cattle. The hedgerows form prominent boundaries to the narrow lanes which are often sunk into the landscape. In July, the verges were covered with lush, mile long displays of Fireweed, golden yellow Meadowsweet and the tall white lacy heads of Cow Parsley and other umbellifers. 

So far, so good. We are in a typically English pastoral landscape of medium sized fields, stag headed hedgerow oaks and small copses, nucleated settlements and outlier farms. There are many old houses in this varied patchwork landscape of narrow lanes, some of the latter still have grass growing in their middles, fields of cereals grown for livestock fodder and hedges which have probably been in place since the last enclosures were made in the 19th century. 

During the late 20th century and the arrival of mass mobility, a move to the countryside became popular with the affluent middle class as a way of escaping the noise, bustle and crime of the cities. This return to the land reversed the process where our 19th century ancestors left the farms for the better pay, security and convenience of the towns. It is par for the course of today’s economic model that the picturesque villages of this area, many of which have roots going back to before the Norman Conquest, some all the way back to Saxon times, have, it seems, mainly become dormers for commuters. 

One beautiful old house I came across is made from sandstone blocks with an upper story from local soft red brick and a timber framed, presumably much older section to its eastern end. In such houses, families have lived out their lives for centuries. Going back only 150 years, the residents would have known a dark under the stars which we can now only see by travelling to Dark Sky Parks like Dumfries and Galloway, the Forest of Kielder and the far north and west of Scotland. Because of the enforced closeness of their living conditions and the lack in those days of electric light, this darkness shaped their thoughts and the very way they lived their lives for much of the year. In fact, the powers of darkness were regarded as a real and ever present threat to their physical and spiritual health. As a result, they took practical steps to ward off evil, the evil eye and the unseen fingers of malice that could sour the milk of their cows or make a horse lame, let alone kill their children or ruin their health without even any physical contact. 

As they were not generally openly written about by ordinary people, there are few easily accessible archives describing the measures taken by individuals in the provinces to keep their families, goods, chattels and properties safe from attack by ‘Old Nick’ as well as maleficent persons, known and unknown.   As a result, these warding off, or apotropaic, practises took several forms that we are only just beginning to identify and research, let alone understand. They included the careful deposition in secret, hidden places in houses, of personal items and even animals (from cats to horse skulls), mostly dead (we assume), together with certain marks made on wood and stone, the former by careful and sustained burning with a taper, the latter with scratched signs, symbols and words. 

These depositions or caches, are now known as spiritual as well as physical middens – collections of deliberately secreted items, ringed about with the power to protect the possible places that evil could, indeed would, given half a chance, enter the house. Where it could cause chaos, material and spiritual disruption and even death. Popular objects in these caches generally have a personal element, clothes and particularly shoes. These items have in common the ability to retain something of the form of their wearer’s feet. Sometimes the objects belonged to someone who was dead. Presumably the thinking was that the shoe/ glove / hat contained or represented the dead person’s spirit which would remain at the place of deposition, guarding against evil and protecting the occupants from harm.  There is a certain amount of commonality to the objects chosen for this purpose. Dead cats and pottery or glass bottles containing bodily fluids and pins, fossil echinoderms (fossilised sea urchins – which look somewhat like old fashioned bed knobs)), flint nodules (flint is not found in Staffordshire so must have reached here by being traded from somewhere else in the country – possibly hundreds of years before) known as thunderstones placed up chimneys to protect against lightning strikes. The same flint nodules would also be held by women in childbirth as protection from post parturition haemorrhage. Objects deliberately placed under thresholds and hearths, over windows, chimneys, fireplaces and doors. All performing an apotropaic or warding off function. Keeping the house residents safe from assaults by the powers of darkness. For darkness was and is a frightening state where dark forces operate with impunity. Few now know how true darkness looks and feels. For it is a palpable, softly deceptive state where the smallest sound is amplified as our senses adjust to dealing with the potential for physical and spiritual threats. Imagine how alert someone five thousand years ago would feel if they had to walk the road from Maer to Chatcull or Bowers in the dead of night. Perhaps their senses were sharper, more refined than ours which are dulled by daily hours of phone screen blue light and street lights. I suspect some of the hollow ways in this area may still provide a degree of darkness that replicates what it feels like to walk out on a moonless, overcast winter’s night. It is also highly likely that some of the houses, particularly the large manor houses and farms, but also any timber framed house of any date before 1900, may contain examples of these apotropaic marks. If anyone would like a survey, I would be happy to oblige. 

Scrape away the layers from this man made landscape and it’s as thin as a pie crust. Thin in the same way as the atmosphere is, a delicate protecting veil separating us from the absolute zero temperature, cosmic rays and vacuum of deep space. It’s also a wet landscape that was even wetter several thousand years ago. Nowadays that equates to a few small marshes, some springs and wells, all of which are marked on the OS map. Today there are several watercourses flowing through the area. The Meece Brook on its eastern edge is the most prominent. Its name survives in documents from the 13th century and probably derives from the Old English word meos or moss – a bog or wet place. There is also conjecture that meece refers to a medieval fish trap built or placed in the flowing water of the brook. Others include the Bromley Brook, which flows out of Bromley Pool, the mill pond at Gerrard’s Bromley, before meeting up with the Chatcull Brook. It was here on a hot July afternoon I saw the biggest pike I have ever seen, jump clear of the water not ten yards out, before slamming back in with a crash. Unusual behaviour for a pike, which are usually ambush predators. Perhaps there is an even bigger pike in there which has turned cannibal? I like to think so. Sorry fisher folk. 

Place, road and field names can provide clues to how a place used to look and how the land was used. Names like Western Meres, the incredibly handsome Tudorbethan farm and its associated outbuildings on the outskirts of Maer. Others wet places named on the map include The Bogs, Lower Bogs, Maer Moss, the Wellings (source of a spring), Blackbrook, Butthouse Lane, Meece Brook, and Swinchurch Brook. Hatton Bogs, Marlpit Plantation, Swinchurch rough (marshy ground unusable for cultivation or pasture). From what I hear, the second ever British site for the very rare black marshland spider Gnaphosa nigerrima was recently found on Cranberry Bog. 

About 12,000 years ago, following the Last Glacial Maximum which began 32,000 years ago, when the ice sheets reached their furthest extent south, temperatures increased and the ice began to melt. This resulted in the formation of a huge post glacial lake north of the area we are discussing. At its southern end, just across the county border in Cheshire, there was a massive terminal moraine which held back the waters for many years. The moraine was composed of rocks, rubble and the ‘rock flour’ ground out from massive sheets of rock, pulverised by the enormous weight of the mile high glacier and carried for hundreds of miles under the ice in its remorseless creep south. According to geologists, the moraine covered 80 square miles and was 71 miles in length. In fact, it was so massive that it has been classified as an area in its own right. In addition to the main lake, there was another large sheet of icy water in the north of our area. Its southern shore covered what is now Hill Chorlton. It is designated Lake Madeley and stretched north and east with its northern shores where Madeley Heath stands today – narrowly missing the site of where Keele University stands today. This was a time when the meers and mosses of this area were all formed. Some of them, called kettle holes, came about from the water released by slowly melting giant blocks of ice. If you walk over Hatton Bogs or The Wellings, you are walking through 12,000 years of more or less continuous landscape history. It is entirely possible that your footprints are contiguous with those of families of Mesolithic hunter groups who walked this way 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. How exciting is that? What would they have seen? What were their lives like? Unfortunately, we will never know. 

However, what we do know is that this was a very watery and wet part of the world for thousands of years – right up until people the time people came and cut down the trees, fenced in the fields and laid drains to run the water away from what eventually became privately owned farm land. A relic of this wealth of water is that the main aquifer for the region still lies underneath Maer and tracks across the northern limits, reaching all the way down the valley of the Meece Brook, beyond Cranberry and Standon. Witness to this are the two, now redundant, Staffordshire Potteries Waterworks Company’s artesian well pumping engine houses built at Mill Meece and Lower Hatton in the 19th and early 20th century to exploit this essential resource. 

In time, it became clear that the huge post glacial lake held within itself its own weakness, which eventually brought a major disaster to the area. This was the second most important phase of post glacial landscape creation following the retreat of the ice. Hydrostatic pressure built up behind the loosely compressed rocky rubble of the moraine to the point that one day it burst. Millions of tons of cold water crashed into the land to the north. It was so powerful that it gouged a number of gorges and channels. Geological records of similar meltwater events further north, in the Macclesfield area, reveal that this all happened in a matter of hours! The remains of the channels it cut, now filled with thousands of years of soil accumulation and vegetation, are still with us today. Three main meltwater channels in the area of Maer have been identified by geologists. As you would expect, all three flow approximately north to south. The first created the valley in which the Swinchurch Brook now flows. The other cut the valley which contains the Meece Brook. The third cut the flow channel which is now the Chatcull Brook. 

I would love to go back to this landscape 10,000 years ago, to the Mesolithic. What would someone walking across the marshy ground have heard? What were the sounds of the Mesolithic – what have we lost? Among many other animals no longer seen or heard in this region today, we might have seen and heard Aurochs, the long extinct precursor of modern cattle. It is thought they browsed on the margins of lakes, moving between open grassland, woodland and reed beds. Aurochs’ habitat appears to have crossed over with that of Elk, which would also have been around then. Like the aurochs, the Elk would have come to the lakes to feed on aquatic vegetation and browse on the thickets of willow and aspen along the shore. Roe deer on the other hand, would have browsed on leaves and grasses in the woodlands. It’s worth noting that all these animals’ behaviour and probably the human families too, would have been affected by interactions with predators – wolves perhaps, and like other browsers and grazers, they would have avoided areas that impeded their mobility and visibility, focusing instead on places with clear lines of sight and unimpeded escape routes. These would be found on the contours just below the tops of the hills – going down to the spring line or lakes and brooks for water and to kill fish for food only when necessary. 

If we could go back in time 10,000 years to the area around Chatcull or the line of the Swinchurch Brook, we might have heard something like this? Take away all the sounds you can hear now. Now add back the clanging, bell like warning calls of a group of cranes, the howl of a distant wolf pack, the deep hoo hooo calls of long eared owls and the rhythmic click of a group of people shaping stone tools from flint nodules. These they would probably have acquired from a trading group on the move, perhaps several months ago. They will still use stone tools and wooden hafted stone axes, maybe antler picks to dig up plants. Archaeologists believe they would have travelled between seasonal camps. Perhaps following animal migration routes or travelling along river valleys. It’s an enticing prospect and it is thought that a watery place like our subject landscape might have been seen as a liminal space, possibly a sacred area in which they could carry out rituals to call for good hunting and safe passage. They may have also carried out burial rites here, possibly leaving the bodies of the dead for excarnation or even placing them in the shallow water of the meres, together with votive offerings of specially made stone tools and wooden objects to aid their journey into the world of the afterlife and their ancestors. Although science is providing more and more factual information about how the people of the past 10,000 years lived, it is still mostly conjecture. How will we be perceived in 10,000 years’ time? We who have destroyed, polluted and disrupted the natural world in a way never seen before. Perhaps North West Staffordshire will be a barren desert by then? Perhaps it will become a water filled landscape once again?  All we know is that, thanks to the relentless actions of plate tectonics, every landscape under our feet, the remains of everything we own, love and hold dear, will one day be subsumed and destroyed in a subduction zone, slowly becoming part of the magma flowing under the earth’s crust – slower even than the glaciers, the land is being pulled under by forces so titanic that we will never be able to change their course. That really is the meaning, the purpose and the endgame of terra. Life goes on, but change is constant. With that rather dark thought, I hope you enjoy this wonderful exhibition of Ian Pearsall’s paintings as much as I know I will. 

Reg Crawford. Writer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reg-crawford-758a161a1

                Limited Edition of Ten bespoke Books :  https://www.etsy.com/uk/flowerboxorguk/listing/950179309/hardback-book-terra-landscape-works-ltd?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1629279444143 

Journey (Ulendo)

  

    There are days, only every so often, when I wake in the morning having snapped sharply out of an all consuming dream; a mash of memories from 'The Land of the Lake' - a childhood in Malawi to which the soundtrack of fish eagles screaming is intensely commensurate to the experience.

 Unforgettable.

 
    Even in a dream it is just as heart stoppingly intense as the last day I heard it. It is a sound that cuts rapier-sharp through the moment, like the memory of it cuts through my present reality.  

Once heard, never forgotten. It's power never diluted.

 
     In the beautiful quiet of the early morning, I am sitting in the shade on a blue sun lounger that is parked on a perfectly manicured lawn up from a soft sandy beach that slopes under the gentle waves of a beautiful blue freshwater lake.
     I'm wearing my swimming trunks and wearing a straw hat. Across to my right is the consistent and rhythmic tsk tsk tsk tsk of a lawn sprinkler, and further back, behind me are the gentle sounds of cutlery chinking and glasses chiming collectively as a large table is being laid for breakfast on the tiled veranda. To the left of me, over a short stretch of lawn and just behind the hedge, a boabab tree towers above all around in a quite spectacular fashion - it's volume of immense proportions.
    Slowly, but steadily, the Adults are arising from their nightly slumber and small conversations are being made whilst iced and freshly squeezed orange juice is being poured. The smell of fresh coffee drifts across the lawn - although, at the age I am, I'm not yet a coffee drinker, although it is part of the vocabulary of social events.
   Already creeping up the lawn toward me is a dividing line between the cool dark of the shade and the ferocious intensity of the sun.
    A voice calls out that breakfast is now ready. Once all seated around the table,  Grace is offered to a God that may or may not be aware of this microcosm of expatriate life on the shores of the ninth largest freshwater lake in the World. An estimated Two Million year old lake, although more recent evidence suggests a basin forming some Eight Million years ago where the East African Rift of two split tectonic pieces allowed it's formation.

    But what do I know?
In this dream I've been transported back to life as it was when I was Twelve years old.

  After the sociability of breakfast, the morning slows down to stop. The heat of the day slowly rises, and the silence matches the pace required to coexist with the heat.

                                 A silence to be shattered by the fish eagle's scream. 

                                             That is my sound of Africa above all else.

Lake Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Malawi
Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malawi

                       
                    'Journey'
 at The Soden Collection in Shrewsbury.
OPENS Saturday 23rd July until Saturday 13th August
https://sodencollection.com

Journey in Print

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/flowerboxorguk

#Scar: from the Rich Earth

         On the ground floor of the City Museum & Art Gallery in Hanley there is a room that I never quite saw the point of when I first visited as a young boy, but which was fascinating nevertheless; full of odd rocks and lifeless stuffed animals!  It's relevance within a museum full of pottery was initially lost on me but I didn't question it back then aged five - I just thought it quirky.  
        The story illustrated in this darkened room told of ancient swamps in the area of a stunted global landscape - pre-continental shifts - hinting at a Britain-shaped land mass conjoined to Europe (Topical ?)    In the midst of all that a region which will be Stoke-On-Trent at some future time, but beyond comprehension as yet. The early 1970's looked nothing like the Middle Paleolithic period tableaux in the museum complex laid out before me - I struggled with this room!
       I suppose I didn't get the point because the number-crunching involved in the great passage of time it illustrates is mind-blowing; but it might as well be just the other week in the greater scheme of things with regard to planet Earth's known existence, and wrapped up in the history of time itself to boot!
      
      The room is still exactly the same today,  but obviously it all makes sense now.
      It all begins with a huge map at the entrance to this room, the natural history section.

      The map is the Mineral Map & Section of the North Staffordshire Coalfield, 'shewing the outcrops of the Various Seams or Strata of Coal & Ironstone.'  I can imagine now; a small smoky office cramped with the presence of heavy coated, top hatted men poring over this comprehensive map wide-eyed with the vision of the potential spoils lying beneath this local earth, and the vast wealth creating possibilities to a grasping gamut of heavy industries operating on the surface, to which these men belonged -  rapidly seducing people off working the land and into the black, grimy filth of dim streets and long hours of harsh unforgiving and life-shortening labour. The Stoke-On-Trent of my fore-fathers no less.

     My particular interpretation of this map prompted me immediately to title this next phase of my work #Scar; for it is, in visual terms, exactly that - an industrial 'scar' across the green and pleasant rural history of Stoke-On-Trent.
     Looking at the map objectively it forms in the mind a conclusion; that which tells us that this city, this conurbation of six highly individual towns, came to being solely from the processes of industry. Coal, Pottery and Steel. It was never a pretty picture from any angle. It starts with wholesale exploitation from the very beginnings; of the land, and ultimately of the people who worked it. What came from here enriched the world.

       Stoke-On-Trent was literally born out of the earth and made with fire!

     The idea of the scar cemented further when I first broached the concept with Dave Harper and Mike Cain, known in team form as The Penkhull Artists Association.
     
       Mike recalled a time in the Seventies when he walked down Basford Bank toward Hanley and was awestruck by the industrial panjandrum within the Etruria valley, occupied primarily with the spectacle of Shelton Bar and Etruria Gasworks. Dave in parallel was exploring a phase in his work concerning strata; layers, lines, textures from nature, colour and contrasts.

       #Scar was born.

      Honestly and shamefully, the work of the Penkhull Artist's Association is a body to which I was curious to only by a passing glance on a particularly busy day - an exhibition I passed through without looking properly. Furthermore I chanced across the website not long after without diving the full depth.
      Now I am fully immersed. It is what I saw in those glimpses; I see primitive forces in slabs of deep rich colours encased in honey-thick glazes, shining from deep within like a kaleidoscope trapped in amber. The primary vehicle is a square slab-made dish of sublime proportions. Heavy in thickness; solid with all the gravity of reason. With it's decoration it delivers mass. Force. Each is highly individual, like tracks on a definitive album - akin to all the instruments in recording one particular track being put away afterwards and another, radically differing set appears, mastering different disciplines to write and record the next; comfortably resonating next to each other as a whole but still resolutely absolute in their individuality.
       Being privileged enough to see a great many all together in one place as the pieces come together prior to selection for this exhibition, I think that any prospective buyer could panic in the instance of having to select the piece to take home. They work collectively as a choir in a cacophony of creative volume, but as an owner of an individual work let me reassure - it sings most beautifully on it's own.

      Rebecca Perry is our quiet delight! Her work is split into two camps. Firstly; bold, fresh, innovative, shocking perhaps and tantalisingly ambiguous! Lucky me to be invited into the depths of her sketchbooks - they confirm resolute lines of direction drawn extensively from intuitive enquiry - a mind open to the vastness of exploration and influence leaving no possibility ignored it seems.
       Secondly, she's very technical: Professional in clay choices, and ghe science of it all - she's articulate and confident, knows why her decisions are made in resolving the brief she sets herself - she knows what she wants her material choices to achieve and her creative instincts to convey with all the confidence that her youth exudes - she has no constraints, and thus she will fly ...

        Lindy Martin I 'discovered' through an image on a business card in a gallery I visited whilst on holiday!  Two or so years passed but when the terms of exhibition required a collaboration approach, and gave me the free rein of dream choices I remembered, and hunted hard for that business card!!
        Initially I loved her utilization of a functional and traditional everyday household item as the teapot is, elevated further still into the realm of conduit to the creative subconscious!! Or rather the creative concious - Lindy is the seeker, explorer and creative adventurer! Her teapots will never have a functional life other than to transfer one's love to... that is certainty all I ask of them! I don't believe in god, I believe we are a product of the Periodic Table of Elements, and the work of Lindy is just that - a belief in the science of things. She told me of her father, a chemist by profession, who passed on a belief, and a confident reliance in things Elemental along with a desire to pursue the investigation of solutions infinite and without boundary ... if the base of her work is clay; then it's resolution will be a revolution ... watch this exhibition space!

      Come along to Valentine Clays (www.valentineclays.co.uk) for the opening night of '#Scar: from the Rich Earth - opening on Thursday 3rd October 2019 at 5.00pm - a visual feast awaits ...

Dave Proudlove - The Landscape that fired imagination.

The Landscape that Fired Imagination

There is a place in the Potteries known as Etruria Valley, a vast swathe of industrial wasteland, its name an invention, the marketing tool of a property developer looking to make gold from what has been left behind almost twenty years after it fell silent.

That place was better known as Shelton Bar, that enormous steelworks that was once massively important to both North Staffordshire and the nation during a time when we used to make things. A place where thousands of people earned their crust. A place of fear and loathing, fascination and inspiration. A moonscape of craters and lagoons, with a volcanic environment that lit up the sky like the end of the world or a permanent Guy Fawkes night, and that bent those that grafted there into strange shapes.

The steel production processes changed the landscape of the valley forever. Shelton Bar covered over 400 acres, and at its peak, employed around 10,000 people, and as well as it’s steelworks, rolling mills and blast furnaces, had its own railway system, five coal mines, and a by-products processing plant. Shelton Bar opened in 1841, closing its doors for the last time on 27th April 2000, by which time, it’s workforce had been reduced to just 300. It was a place of high productivity, but also efficient and innovative, and in 1964 became the world’s first steel plant using 100% continuously cast production. It was by far the biggest industrial complex in Stoke-on-Trent, and it continues to haunt and inspire the city to this day.

Shelton Bar’s relationship with the human race was mainly an economic one. But for some, it was also a creative relationship, and it has fired the imagination of many throughout the ages.

The Bard of the Potteries Arnold Bennett was transfixed by Shelton Bar, or ‘Cauldon Bar’, as he christened it in his Five Towns epics…

“…long fields of ironstone glowed with all the colours of decadence. The entire landscape illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime…”

Artists such as Arthur Berry, Reginald Haggar, Alf Wakefield and Sid Kirkham were fascinated with industrial processes and their effect on people and place, and Shelton Bar hung heavy over much of their work.

During the 1970s, as the nationalised steel industry was undergoing a programme of rationalisation, the future of Shelton Bar was at risk, and the local New Victoria Theatre – at the time, Britain’s only professional theatre in the round – led by their legendary artistic director Peter Cheeseman produced Fight for Shelton Bar, a musical documentary designed to highlight the plight of the thousands of steelworkers whose livelihoods were at risk.

The struggle to preserve the site for the good of the city was also commemorated by a beautiful sculpture by Colin Melbourne which stands proud alongside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and bears the inscription:

“I believe in the dignity of labour. Whether with head or hand. That the world owes no man a living, but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living”

The rationalisation of the Shelton Bar site continued into the 1980s, rendering large parts of the site redundant and creating much blight. The Government intervened by selecting the redundant land – alongside Wedgwood’s former Etruria Works – as the location of the second National Garden Festival in 1986, the newly greened and rejuvenated site opened by the Queen. The reclamation works cost £5million, the delivery of the festival £18million, and included some exceptional landscape design – including the planting of 300,000 trees – and great public art, including the sculpture A View, A Place by Antony Gormley which adorns the highest point of the site.

In more recent times, local writer Paul Smith memorably described Shelton Bar in his memoir Tales from the Boothen End – the View from My Window…

“…if you watched long enough…a door would open in the mountain side and fire belched out just below the ridge where Shelton Bar nestles between the pitheads. This was the best train of all, wandering into the great black pit with neat little heaps of fire in the trucks along its length. When it got to the blackest of the ridge, all tipped together and the hot slag poured like a bleeding wound…”

But perhaps the most notable of those affected by this fiery world was a man who hailed from Kent, who began his career as a teacher before becoming one of the world’s most influential writers. That man was H.G. Wells.

Although Wells’ work spanned numerous genres, he became most famous for works such as The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine. Indeed, Wells was the greatest science fiction panjandrum of the 19th Century.

In 1888, Wells came to the Six Towns to stay with an old college friend at his home in Basford, 18 Victoria Street. While in the Potteries, Wells also spent some time at the Leopard in Burslem, the scene of a deal that enabled the building of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and thus opening-up the valley in which Shelton Bar stood.

The view over urban Stoke-on-Trent from Basford would have been characterised by the filth, fire and smoke from Shelton Bar, and it’s thought that some of the descriptive text in ‘The War of the Worlds’ was inspired by the skies above Shelton Bar’s furnaces.

But Wells went even further. In 1895 he published the short story The Cone, that was directly influenced by Shelton Bar. Described as a tale of “love, unfaithfulness and terrible revenge”, The Cone tells the story of an artist that visits the ironworks to capture the industrial landscape when its manager discovers the artists’ affair with his wife. The Cone depicts both the drama and horror of Shelton Bar, it’s opening line gives a taste of things to come…

“The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer…”

Wells went on to describe…

“…pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven…”

…which captured perfectly the creation of the hideous urban smog that dominated the atmosphere, blackened the fine buildings of the Six Towns, and overcame the locals.

*

Fast forward to 2018, and although Shelton Bar is long gone, it still continues to inspire creative people. Local artist Ian Pearsall’s latest exhibition Fire and Light, is based on his work, Steel, and is hosted by the Art and Craft Collective of Edinburgh.

This new work sees Ian explore familiar themes, but his prodigious use of colour takes him in a slightly new direction, and although I never experienced Shelton Bar, Ian’s work captures perfectly how it appears in my mind’s eye; that lively, volcanic landscape once again firing the imagination of a great and unique talent.

Ian’s passion for the Potteries runs deep, and at the heart of this is his interest in the stories of the people who have populated its industrial landscapes and townscapes over many, many years, and this comes out in Fire and Light.

Central to the exhibition is a haunting piece, ‘John Walks Away’ in which an almost ghost-like human figure stands beside the silhouette of the remaining furnaces of Shelton Bar, and beneath a murky, smoggy sky, knowing that the end was upon him.

And John is a real person, one of the remaining 300 steel workers in the last days of Shelton Bar. John walked away the day before the site closed forever, declining to take his redundancy pay because he had an unshakeable belief that he was going to become a successful professional snooker player.

But John’s dream died in much the way his former workplace did, and he eventually succumbed to an addiction, mirroring the demise of many other former workers in post-industrial towns and cities.

‘John Walks Away’ is classic Pearsall. Through his work, Ian captures the story of a people, and how their environment made and shaped them. He captures the memory and loss associated with deindustrialisation, but in a very real and authentic way. And in the current political climate, dominated by Trump and Brexit, this is incredibly important. Although Fire and Light is a love song to people and place, it is also a major political statement.

Modern Stoke-on-Trent is not the place it was. The pits have gone, the making of pots is now done differently, and Shelton Bar has also disappeared. But it is now one of the greenest cities in the country, and its creative DNA is being put to use in a million other ways; Ian Pearsall is a living, breathing example.

We now have a generation who have little or no idea what life was like before such places fell silent. But thanks to Ian Pearsall other fellow creative minds, we can all get a taste.

Although Shelton Bar is gone, in many ways, it will always be with us.

DP
Sep-18

Mike Cain - A Terrible Beauty.

 
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: Thoughts on the work of Ian Pearsall by Mike Cain.

Stoke on Trent has been painted and photographed many times over the last hundred years or so. Michael Ayrton painted a 'Shard ruck' in Etruria in the 1930s. Ernest Warrilow created a huge archive of photographs of the city (now held at Keele University) and Arthur Berry painted 'The Potteries' and its people throughout the post-war period until his death in 1994. These and many other artists have made Stoke on Trent one of the most visually well documented places in the country. So whenever I see new work showing the city I ask myself what does this artist bring to the table?
In the case of Ian Pearsall it begins with his composite approach. He sketches, takes photographs and finds images, then draws past and present together into compositions that offer an exciting sense of the dynamic. In one of the paintings the outline of a terrace of houses runs down a hillside from left to right across the picture plane. From the centre of the image comes a line of figures walking towards us. Their collective form makes a kind of black wedge. These elements give the work a sense of movement, space and depth.
Ian’s work isn’t just about Stoke on Trent, but whatever the subject matter his work’s strength often derives from a strong sense of tonality with blacks, whites, and greys juxtaposed with smaller areas of strong colour. His willingness to create what I can best describe as a colour climate rather than working within the perceived palette, shows considerable courage. Finally there is that something special. A kind of raw energy. It is a quality that the poet W.B Yates speaks of in his poem Easter 1916 - 'A terrible beauty'.
Stoke on Trent has produced countless objects of great beauty, but that achievement has come at a great cost. Its interdependent industries not only scarred the land with their smoking chimneys, slag heaps, shard-rucks and marl holes, they scarred the workers and citizens with tuberculosis, silicosis, rickets and all manner of respiratory diseases.
Ian's paintings have great integrity. They do not attempt to glamorise and while they often draw on the past, they do not wallow in sentimentality. He has the courage to show his world ‘warts and all’ hence a 'terrible beauty'. His work has something else – progression. He continues to experiment and to move forward, and it is this, which I believe holds the key to his future as an artist.

'Fire & Light - The STEEL Series of drawings' opens at The Arts & Craft Collective Gallery; 93 Causwayside, Edinburgh, EH9 1QG on Thursday 18th October 2018 at 6.30pm for canapes and drinks! 

 

STEEL at Art & Craft Collective: Edinburgh.

   

   It is spoken in the family story that my Granny as a young woman in the early years of the twentieth century along with her brother Harry and two other sisters, walked the two-hundred and forty three miles from the tiny Scottish coastal town of Ayr to Stoke-On-Trent, my home town. The finer details of this great trek have been eroded by time and by the passing of all whom who undertook it even if the memory of them as individuals has not diminished. Her husband, my Grandad hailed from the Black country where our name is more prolific and a significant piece of the family story begins here in Stoke.
       I was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia in Central Africa. My father; the son of the afore-mentioned union travelled his own journey – it must be in the blood! The war for independence that created Zimbabwe was not my father’s war, and thus we (I was a one-year old on this journey!) drove the three-hundred and sixty-five miles to Blantyre, in Malawi where we lived and I grew up and was schooled for the next sixteen years.
       In 1984 I made my own journey – here to the UK.
One of the first things I did was to visit Blantyre in Scotland; birthplace of Dr. David Livingstone – the man who put the place where I'd spent the early years of my life on the map.
     It is with a huge sense of adventure that I now bring my work here to Edinburgh by the kind invitation of Linsay Given Black of Art & Craft Collective, and I am truly delighted and honoured for yet another great connection with Scotland...

https://www.creative-edinburgh.com/OurMembers/details/9797

https://youtu.be/XFOEBVKjNrk

The Ballad of the Street...

    The year heads inevitably toward a conclusion but my work opens a new chapter and already heralds in the next.

      Over the last few months I've been in collaboration with a man who's finger reassuringly measures the pulse generated by the beating heart of this conurbation, and who's mind interprets facts, disseminates theory and then fashions a suggestion towards remedial solutions; unselfishly and philanthropically by encouraging, nurturing and harnessing community-friendly aspirations through an astutely considered and meticulously researched penmanship that is much anticipated every Wednesday in the pages of The Sentinel Newspaper of North Staffordshire.
      One of his notable hallmarks is to trumpet the work of innovators and social champions whether historically established, overlooked, or thrusting their way into the contemporary context of modern life as it happens now!

      The man is Dave Proudlove who's quietly spoken manner, and cool and collected demeanour belies an explosive internal furnace of energy and ideas enviably capable of harnessing a multitude of muli-faceted disciplines together in an organisational masterclass that just happens to be his every day life.

       If I seem to be displaying considerable bias you could be forgiven, but this is my observation.
If I seem to be strangely knowledgeable on the man, then it is through being on the receiving end of his appraisal, and it has done me no harm - in fact it has terrifyingly raised the tempo considering I was quietly minding my own business when his radar detected my minute creative endeavor, wrestlïng as it has been doing with the enormity of realising personal human stories from within the colossal historical industrial heritage that Stoke-On-Trent is, tucked away in the beautiful but decaying antiquity of a top-floor grotto that lends itself to being my studio in a former pottery works building in Longton town.

      One morning Dave came to see me, and the following week I read this:  http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/personally-speaking-dave-proudlove-talented-pearsall-is-our-new-man-of-fire/story-30386645-detail/story.html

       That painting of mine spawned a conversation of kindred thinking, and our mutual vision manifested itself as a quest to capture the essence of the vista it created. Over beers in The Congress Inn, Longton he read to me the thoughts he'd put into writing, thus;

       " Ballad of the Streets is a look back at my coming of age in a working class neighbourhood as It's city lost It's industry and some of It's purpose. It is a love letter to It's people and the lives we lived together. It is a howl of fury at misguided and damaging political decisions that have eroded the character of such places, and affected people's lives.

 It is also a look at the human condition in a place without definition. It is part memoir, part social commentary, laced with emotion and dark, dark humour."

        It has been something of a personal journey to illustrate this title, the scope of which in the overall surface of possibility it covers, is only minutely scratched, and I come to realise that our, and millions of other childhoods throughout this city,  and even the world over have kindred resonances - it does not have to be about the surroundings that we grow up within - but about the forgotten, or overlooked intricacies in the act of growing up itself.

      Don't let me give the whole game away though... we don't yet have a tangible product in a finished book, although we're as close as damn-it ...

... come and see us present what we have so far!

Hosted by Trent Art Gallery, ( www.trent-art.co.uk ) in their ongoing series of artist lectures held at the prestigious Potter's Club ( thepottersclub.co.uk )

Online ticket sales:   http://www.wegottickets.com/event/414653
    
    Trent Art Gallery, 19 Brunswick Street, Newcastle-Under-Lyme. ST5 1HF.
Phone: 01782 610588 or Email: art@trent-art.co.uk

Twitter: @TrentArtGallery 
Mine: @flowerboxorguk
 Dave: @fslconsult
Potter's Club: @thepottersclub