A counter-hegemonic craft? Exploring the potency of porcelain in an anticolonial art practice

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This practice-based research project will look at the affective potential of colonial commodities, with a particular focus on porcelain, to challenge the consensus on the history and legacy of empire. It will engage this line of enquiry from an aesthetic, philosophical, political and sociological perspective. My art practice, rooted in craft processes and the conceptual use of materials, will be both a testbed and exposé of the academic research, integral to its development and dissemination.I will explore the potency of porcelain, a colonial commodity laden with symbolic value, as a sculptural material, and to what extent it could be used to counter the dominant hegemonic, but precariously fragile and white, view of colonial history. This line of research is timely, pertinent and urgent. Now, more than ever, UK society needs to engage with racism, and I am interested in exploring how artists can contribute to this. As Paul Gilroy emphasises, "neither race nor racism are the exclusive historical property of the minorities who are their primary victims". Dismantling white supremacy and exposing the whitewashing of imperial history is not the job of people of colour. White people must do the work and recognise that racism is very much a contemporary problem. My aim is that this research will contribute to an "unlearning of imperialism", as Ariella Azoulay puts it. Her Potential History will be a crucial guide in my efforts in this project to disengage from imperialism's ways of knowing. My personal interest in making work about colonial history stems from my extended family's rich, but sometimes contentious, mix of backgrounds - ancestors from both sides of the colonial slavery divide; vocal nostalgia for empire vying with bouyant radical blackness. The conceptual use of the raw materials of imperial trade has been at the heart of my art practice for over 10 years. My approach to making art with colonial commodities is deeply engrained with craft thinking and I intend to use this discipline to develop an intimate affinity with these raw materials. I would like to develop research I began for my Masters dissertation at Goldsmiths College that explored the agency and affect of engaging with 'vibrant' matter. Porcelain will be the main reference, but I want to apply craft processes to access the affective vibrancy of bagasse, cotton, cochineal, copper, indigo, rubber, tea, sugar and salt. This will form the basis of my investigation into the entanglements and politically resonant discourses that their history and characteristics generate.Fetishised as it is by privileged Western collectors and makers, porcelain has a fraught symbolism that has not been adequately critiqued in accounts of its history. Its associations with power and privilege are skated over by Edmund de Waal in The White Road. But perhaps its very whiteness, perceived purity and raw fractiousness can both embody and contest political whiteness, making it an apt material for an artistic exposé of the whitewashing of colonial history.