Made in China 2: Something to remind you

Just in case you’ve been on Mars, two major events are on the horizon that will be especially significant for Londoners.

The first is a royal wedding, an occasion when at least two of those involved will probably wish they could just get on with it without all the attention. The second is the 2012 Olympics, an occasion where all of those concerned hope for lots of the right kind of attention (a sports festival free of corruption/scandal/performance enhancing drugs - don‘t hold your breath).

What they have in common is that they will provide opportunities for a great many people to make an awful lot of money, in some cases by selling something truly awful.

Having perused gift stalls in the stifling heat myself, I can understand why someone saw a certain item and thought of me. They were thirsty, their feet hurt and they felt they had to get me something. Besides, everything looks terrific in strong sunlight. Bad taste isn‘t really why I‘m raising this issue, if someone cares enough to buy me a gift on their holiday I should be grateful for it. What winds me up is how often I turn these things over and see the words “Made in China” on the back.

One of the ugliest gifts to grace our home was a nightlight holder from Lanzarote, nasty to handle and impossible to clean because it was so rough, a humorous reminder of the black volcanic landscape of the island. It was horrible but at least it had the virtue of being made in the place that it represented! Its maker is holding their own against an onslaught of foreign made souvenirs.

If, as I do, you live near a big city that attracts tourists, take a look at what’s on sale to those who spend their hard earned money in your country. Take a long hard look at the things that some retailers have chosen to represent you, your culture, your home. Remember, they’ll see them and they’ll think of you.

Walking past a shop in a local station overflowing with items aimed at visitors, I’ve always wondered where the small plastic Union flag purses were made. So in the interests of research I bought one and found that it was, of course, made in China.

I doubt if those buying these purses really give a damn where they were made, they probably just want something cheap, but I’m beginning to wish that they did. “Souvenir” is a French word meaning “to remember”. If the people who buy these things want something to remind them of the time they spent in the UK I would rather it was actually made here and reflected the good design we are capable of, however cheap the item.

Those plastic purses are made by a British company and according to their website they design what they sell. At one time they also made their products in the UK. All sorts of reasons get cited for the transfer of production abroad by companies like this. Top of the list is that it is often cheaper to manufacture goods outside the UK. Lower costs, fewer regulations, quicker production and supply of short runs all figure in the reasoning behind a move abroad. It makes for a wider profit margin and you could argue that, as the company is based in the UK, it’s a good thing because the profits stay here. However, lower costs means lower wages. Fewer regulations can mean poor working conditions and little or no trade union representation. Speedy supply and short runs? Pressure to work long hours in a job with little security. It also means jobs lost or never even created in the country that these souvenirs are supposed to be a reminder of.


The company responsible for the purse has also created a royal wedding range and I would be surprised if any of it has been made in the UK. They’ve used licensed photographs of the couple on their plates, mugs and magnets which means they’ve had to pay to do so. Another company has avoided this by producing a range called “Royal Wedding” which makes no specific reference to them. You’ll find it in branches of a large supermarket chain, everything from paper napkins to a replica of that sapphire engagement ring. It appears again, in miniature, as a pair of earrings, made in China. The official royal wedding range sold through the Buckingham Palace shop, is made in Stoke-on-Trent, where ceramic goods have been produced for centuries and the profits will go towards preserving the extensive Royal Collection.

I find the failure to provide British made souvenirs for a truly British event like the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton particularly frustrating because I keep being told that the UK will benefit from both it and the Olympics. It’s hard to see how we can if there are factories in China just waiting for the news of a royal engagement and capable of turning out thousands of items within days.

The Olympics should be an opportunity for the creative as well as the sporting community of a host country to profit but it seems to me that the benefits and rights of the occasion are shared out amongst corporations long before the circus hits town. The contract to supply enamel pin badges, one of the most lucrative elements of the souvenir industry for the London 2012 Olympics, was awarded to a Chinese company. Many of the twenty-six companies it beat off to win the contract were British - where did they go wrong? I contacted one company that sells enamel badges and according to the person I spoke to there is only one small business still making them in this country. The reasons they aren’t using that manufacturer? Cost and lead time. The profit made on these things is so big that even notching up thousands of air miles by flying them to the UK is no big deal.


It is the small, almost disposable items like badges that bring in the cash, the things that almost everyone can afford. Ask the person managing the shop at any stately home in the UK what the best sellers are and I guarantee that the answer will be erasers, pencils and postcards, because they regularly welcome parties of school children with pocket money budgets. It would be fantastic if all those small basic souvenirs could be made in the UK. A company called Pageantry Postcards is making the effort to produce its goods here and they are typical of the sort of company we should all be supporting. Another, at the more expensive end of the scale, is Colonial Soldier which sells hand carved figures of British soldiers alongside antiques.

I find it extraordinary that a country with such a great reputation for studio pottery does little to promote it to tourists visiting the UK and to organisations such as the London Olympics Organising Committee. Use of the Olympic brand is so tightly regulated that it is unlikely that a local potter could get away with knocking out a few mugs with “Olympics 2012” painted on them. In fact he or she wouldn’t even be allowed to paint on the words “London 2012” without the written consent of LOCOG.

In my opinion it is only legislation and official promotion which will help local artists to genuinely benefit from big events. Discussion and awareness of the issue by local legislators is long overdue. In some cases it is takes simple embarrassment to effect a change but what will it take to embarrass our politicians into changing this?

Think about what you spend your money on when you next take a holiday or mark an occasion. It isn’t just about job creation and national pride. Concerns about human and animal rights should make everyone think twice about what they take home with them. Personally I don’t want to look at something in my home and know that the person who made it is denied rights that I take for granted, nor do I want visitors to my country to believe that I’m happy that British souvenirs are made somewhere like that. It’s nothing to be proud of. There are so many gifted craftspeople and artists out there - make the effort to look for them. They might not be plastering what they make with the local flag but what they create can be just as effective a reminder of a good time.

Guggenheim Museum petition for Ai Weiwei, collaborative artist, Bird’s Nest stadium, Beijing
Olympics 2008

Make a donation to Kate and William’s favoured charities

A pot addict confesses and appeals for help

Well, it got your attention didn’t it? Actually, the type of pot I am obsessed with is the kind you look at, fill with pot pourri or soup. Not the kind you smoke.



I haven’t given in to my addiction to things ceramic for a few years but I have just parted with £25 to help out a talented potter called Kirsty Badham. Her kiln came over all chaotic recently and destroyed some pots-in-progress. In an effort to raise the funds to repair it, Kirsty has offered to make a bowl in return for each of the 100 pledges of £25 that she receives through this site:
http://www.pledgeforapot.co.uk/



Now, I am trying to be helpful by doing this but I also see this as an opportunity to buy a unique and lovely thing at a bargain price - I’m not stupid - at a time when things are rather tight (I have yet to break the news to The Attached One that I have taken this course). In fact, if money was no object I know that we would not be able to move for things ceramic. I’m not sure how or when this need to own pots developed, it may have started at the British Museum where I fell in love with ancient pieces such as those made by the Beaker People. I expect Freud and Jung would see connections with wombs or similar but that’s all too complicated for me. I just like pots.



The last investment of this kind was a week’s wages spent on a bowl by Julia Jefferson. I needed a salad bowl and it occurred to me that I could eat from something handmade and beautiful rather than mass produced. It means a lot of careful hand washing but I still love it. When we brought it home I couldn’t stop looking at it and it seems to have been made for blackberries.



When I actually got the chance to make pots myself things just got worse. I don’t want to mislead you, don’t imagine that I am capable of slapping a lump of clay onto a potter’s wheel and turning it into something resembling a bowl. My efforts were restricted to pieces built from slabs or formed in plaster moulds, incorporating leaves and fabric dipped into slip (liquid clay). As far as I was concerned it was choosing the glaze that was the fun part.



Once I left college (and free access to a kiln, clay, glazes and knowledge) I had to buy my pots from other people, often potters who had stalls at festivals and fairs. I went through an unfortunate phase when I bought every chipped and manky piece of 1930’s crockery that I could find for 50p at car boot sales. Most of these are now living in boxes under my work room table. No Clarice Cliff unfortunately.



Some unusual items have made it onto the walls and into a display cabinet. I dream of eating from plates made by Sean Miller, an urban potter based in my area and one day that will happen. Until then I drool as I sit in front of the screen, perusing craftsmen potter sites. It has been a while so I think I deserve one of Kirsty’s bowls. Can’t wait to see it…

A

Somewhere else

When I was a small girl I used to spend Saturdays wandering around London with my father. One of our regular haunts was the Arts Council shop which I seem to remember was in Saville Row. The counter near the front of the shop had a display of postcards in front of it which was at my eyelevel and I remember being entranced by a picture that seemed as real as a photograph. I realised that it couldn’t be a photograph as the people in it were wearing strange old fashioned clothes but even at that age (about five) I knew that my drawings would never be that good. The postcard that I went home with showed William Holman Hunt‘s “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” and I still have it, along with many more showing the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I suspect it was the fact that there were grown up ladies dressed as princesses in their paintings without anyone finding it silly that made them interesting as well but even at that age it was impossible to ignore the skill of these artists. The sunlight of Victorian England was trapped in their canvases and the extraordinary jewel like detail of every flower and strand of hair was a shock to my senses. For a child I had spent an unusually large amount of time in front of well known canvases and although I liked some of them I can’t remember feeling the same way about what I had seen before then.

Whatever the reason for my interest the Pre-Raphaelites still have a hold on me and when I saw that Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum were displaying the Burne Jones “Perseus” series (which belongs to Stuttgart’s art gallery) I suggested (without any hope of his agreeing) that Birmingham might be an interesting place to visit. Bearing in mind that he was facing four hours of driving I was a bit surprised when he said “yes”. The car doesn’t get used for much more than the commute to work a few miles away and shopping so this was a real expedition. We checked out parking in Birmingham’s city centre and he set up the sat nav.

I had intended to get up early but managed to oversleep so we set off later than planned. We live in an area where the suburbs start to break up into industrial sites and scrub so it wasn’t long before we were into open farmland. I don’t think the landscape could be described as particularly dramatic but on the way there and back I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I am to live here. Rolling hills, hedgerows and huge old trees. Cows, sheep and the occasional bird of prey, chilling out on a fence post and watching the traffic.

A visit to Birmingham was an opportunity to see my favourite source of quilt making supplies “in the flesh”. The Cotton Patch even provides a few parking spaces. Crammed very neatly into this small shop are fabrics from all over the world, magazines and books, and everything you could possibly need to make the perfect quilt. I have always wanted to buy one of the many Japanese magazines they have available so, head still buzzing from the motorway, I tried to look through them but then just caved in and bought the first one I had seen. I could have bankrupted myself in minutes there so I stuck to the plan and one magazine was my limit.

The sat nav decided to take us through Moseley via Shirley Green which has a lovely red brick Baptist church. We decided that Hall Green was a lot like Edgware and Moseley was definitely like Southall, even down to the traffic. The architecture is largely Victorian red brick and it occurred to me, as it has in the past, that this sort of thing survives when no one can afford to pull it down and rebuild. Lovely small intimate buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century with the occasional 1930’s bit of Art Deco, battered but still in use.

At last we managed to get into the city centre and after a couple of wrong turns we found the chosen car park. It was a short walk to the gallery past some really beautiful and recently cleaned buildings. That part of the city is pedestrianised and we walked through a mall into a large piazza like area with curved steps where people were sitting in the sunshine. Within minutes we were in front of the strange dramatic grey green canvases and drawings produced by Burne Jones in the 1880’s and 1890’s, displayed against rich teal walls. We are so familiar with Pre-Raphaelite art from reproductions in books but there is nothing quite like the real thing. For one thing the images in glossy coffee table books are sometimes larger than the actual painting. Like the teeny weeny “Death of Chatterton” by Henry Wallis. We mused about “Beata Beatrix” and “Proserpine”, made knowing “we used to be art students” type comments about their techniques and then wandered off to see some of the rest of this surprising gallery. There followed the obligatory visit to the shop to buy some postcards and then it was back into the sunshine for something to drink and, alas, back into the car for the long drive.

Home, backs aching and heads spinning, it was hard to get used to the fact that we had been a long way off and back again in the same day. We ought to do it more often, other people would, but I wonder how many would travel that far because of a few old paintings. Still mad for the Pre-Raphaelites after all these years. And still buying postcards.
http://www.bmag.org.uk/

http://www.cottonpatch.co.uk/

http://www.preraphaelites.org

　
　

Through a glass, darkly, and whilst wearing dark glasses

I was channel surfing a few nights ago when I came across a documentary about Eric Gill, the sculptor. As I began to watch it there was something at the back of my mind, a slightly uncomfortable feeling. Eventually I remembered that Eric Gill was thought to have been a child abuser. This was confirmed by a visit to Wikipedia. These weren’t just allegations made against him, he described his activities in his own diaries.

Eric Gill was responsible for monuments, sculptures and plaques all over the country, the work of almost forty years. Much of his work is to be found in churches and he had quite a lot to say about man’s relationship with God. Some may wonder if God has had quite a lot to say to him, if there is an afterlife. As far as I know no one has asked that his work be destroyed or removed, and typefaces that he designed are still in use. Does this mean that the work of a self confessed abuser can be regarded as absolutely separate from the crimes that he has committed? Should I feel bad for liking the work of Eric Gill?

I find it difficult to sit through a Michael Jackson video, even though he was found not guilty on all charges of sexually abusing children in 2005. I wonder how many people in his entourage breathed a sigh of relief when that happened, not because they were concerned about him or believed in his innocence but because it meant that there was nothing to stop his music being played by the respectable and therefore royalties would still roll in. I’m no fan of his later stuff, but if “Don’t stop ‘Til You Get Enough” comes on I’ll watch it, feeling queasy and guilty all the way through it.

When it comes to Gary Glitter that opportunity never arises. His former backing band are till touring but I doubt if he has made much money from royalties lately. I loved Gary Glitter’s music when I was a kid and when the charges against him were first made public I couldn’t believe it. I suppose that by not buying his albums his former fans are punishing him in the only way they can. I suspect this means that the Glitter Band can’t use any material that he wrote and have to come up with their own songs. If I came across an old LP in a charity shop I might even consider buying it (not that I have the equipment to play it on any more) but I probably wouldn’t show it to anyone.

There is just something about a charge of child abuse that leaves a stain that cannot be erased or ignored. It isn’t like any other crime, partly because those who commit this kind of offence tend to keep on doing it or trying to. You can’t help feeling that even when most offenders of this nature are caught out they really don’t believe that they’ve done anything wrong. Society can tolerate a murderer who has done his or her time being amongst them but rarely a proven paedophile. The strange thing is that “Alice In Wonderland” is still a best seller when it must be obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells that its creator, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), had an unhealthy interest in photographing little girls. There is no evidence that he took his attentions towards his models any further but I am sure that if Dodgson was alive today he would have taken advantage of the internet in the same way that many paedophiles have.

That looking is considered to be as bad as touching means that the career of an actor like Chris Langham is probably over. He was one of the main characters in “The Thick Of It”, a very popular TV satire of the Blair Government, but since his conviction for downloading child pornography he has not been seen in anything other than vehicles clearly meant to rehabilitate his career. In Langham’s case the images in question went quite a lot further than small girls in tastefully arranged drapery. They included video clips of the most violent kind and extreme kind. The impact on his colleagues must have been devastating. To find that someone who you may have introduced your own children to has tastes of this kind must have been shattering, knowing that your very successful television career may now depend on the amount of distance you can put between him and your next great script must have been almost as unnerving.

I still don’t know how I feel about this. I am thinking of buying a DVD of “The Thick Of It”, even though it features Langham. That Glitter LP might turn up. If it does I’ll keep the volume down.