An AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award has made collaboration possible between Northumbria University and the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead in providing the opportunity to highlight a significant narrative in craft history. Henry Rothschild, a German emigre, ran the iconic craft outlet Primavera from 1946 to 1980. During this time, he built up an internationally significant collection of ceramics, now housed at the Shipley Art Gallery, along with a personal and business archive. By bringing this inaccessible and underused material to the fore and complementing it with interviews with Rothschild’s contemporaries, connections have emerged that were previously undiscovered. This thesis demonstrated how Rothschild’s position as a retailer, exhibitor and collector marked him as a unique character within the crafts as well as demonstrated the ways in which he utilised his position as an emigre to act outside of the confines of the traditional British standpoint. The narrative of Rothschild has been interwoven into the existing literature on craft in Britain, creating a previously unheard of account of post-war craft.

Although Rothschild’s role in the post-war craft world has been remarked upon in a number of texts (Cooper, 2012; Harrod, 1995; Harrod, 1999; Buckley and Hochsherf, 2012) his wide reaching impact and contribution has never been explored in detail. This thesis considered the contradictory nature of Rothschild’s multiple roles and the resulting implications: as a retailer he was motivated to choose pieces that would sell, as an exhibitor he could allow for more creativity and daring in his curatorial choices, and as private collector he enjoyed established relationships with craftspeople. The aim of this thesis was to position Rothschild as collector, exhibitor and retailer not only within the context of British craft, but also to consider how Primavera operated within what David Kynaston calls the ‘justly iconic’ time period from 1945 to 1980 (Kynsaton, 2007). Through both his retail and exhibition activity at Primavera and beyond, craft was given a platform, made accessible to the wider public and influenced taste and fashion. His background as a German Jewish emigre emerged as key to understanding how he negotiated his position within this world.

The resulting thesis confirmed and elucidated the significance of Rothschild and Primavera and called for further research into those individuals who are very much of the craft world but not always as producers or educators. As demonstrated here, such examinations have the potential to offer a narrative which is both complementary and challenging to those which dominate, and thereby contribute to the discourse on the nature of narrative based research and craft history.

Henry Rothschild and Primavera: The retail, exhibition and collection of craft in post-war Britain, 1945-1980

The glass quality that I work to achieve is opaque or translucent glass with a surface
resembling polished semi-precious minerals, veined with a spectrum of dark contrasting hues. Therefore, my methodology is based on exploration of the technological potential of glass to realise my formal aims. The Lithyalin colouring
glass technique invented by Friedrich Egermann in 1828 is the principal inspiration that pushed my research further. Consequently, this dichroic phenomenon gave rise
to the critical sense that colour may be perceived integrally as a dimensional constituent of form, and as such requires the use of 'haptic vision', once common to
ancient Egyptian cognition. My aim was to understand what it means to reproduce a mineral entity, considering that not only ingredients and the process of making define the aesthetics of a final outcome. I had to define why it would be important to look at recreating particular coloured glasses, and I therefore sought to define what the idea of ‘resemblance’ is, and if we may subject it to a concept.
My research develops in discourse with my chosen sources (chosen painters, glassmakers and philosophers) through art-historical study, and through practice, by aspiring to extend their technological investigation. My research relied tightly on some philosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and in particular those found in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, 1993. I aim to translate his theoretical reasoning into a glass object. I consider the progression of folding comparable to chromatic mineral growth under stress, and additionally, in a limited amount of time, glass material
allows the reconsideration of process similar to that of crystal formation. Hence, through my artistic practice I constantly search for the appropriate practical modes
of gesture in order to align my body with this movement.

Trusting the body. Colour pattern making in glass inspired by Lithyalin glass formula

This book gathers together a selection of Britton’s writings, including new, previously unpublished pieces, in an investigation of what the crafts have meant through the last three decades. Britton has mainly published in the ephemeral forms of exhibition catalogues and magazines. Her intention with Seeing Things was to assemble not simply an essay anthology, but rather an historical narrative of the development and the new conceptions of craft, as revealed in the threads of one person’s commissioned output throughout the period of Postmodernism.
The particular slant of insider/outsider writing was key to the project for Britton as practitioner and critic. Despite her roots in ceramic practice, much of her writing has been about other disciplines. Britton’s close relationship with two leading galleries in London (Contemporary Applied Arts, 1984–95, and Barrett Marsden/Marsden Woo Gallery, 1998–present), led to her contributing short introductions to new work by a wide range of exhibitors.
Britton argues that craft is not a discrete category with its own rules, but an ingredient across the spectrum of art and design, making it more dynamic, exciting and complex than is often assumed. The overlaps and ambivalent borderlines, especially in the rapid evolution of the 1980s, broke with the past and brought new ideas to light. Her situation as a maker, teacher and curator, and the complexity of changing cultural definitions in the past 30 years have been a continuous stimulus to writing and making.
The innovation of the book comes from combining initial response and retrospective reflection. Using the material written when the work was just made, and evaluating the perceptions of that time through new writing that introduces, and comments on, the text selections made, Britton aims for a particular combination of immediacy and distance, the coal-face and the bird’s eye view.

http://www.interpretingceramics.com/issue016/downloads/ICRC%20Kimberley%20Chandler%20Seeing%20Things-%20Collected%20Writing%20on%20Art,%20Craft%20and%20Design.pdf

Seeing Things: Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design

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Seeing Things: Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design