The Mechanics of Middleport

Confused about block/case/mould terminology? Don’t be – there’s a comic for that!

I’ve just finished the final collection of new illustrations for Middleport Pottery – more nineteenth-century pottery manufacturing jobs, and more diagrammatic panels showing processes involved in making various kinds of production moulds.

The more work I’ve done at Middleport, the more I’ve been impressed by the way in which comics as a format have been able to communicate the complexities of this kind of archaeology. Industrial archaeology is the archaeology of process. It’s impossible to look at material from an industrial archaeology site and not talk about how these things were made. From bits of steam engines to kiln-waste to underglaze transfer ceramics, this stuff is the material tip of a huge and revolutionary social, cultural and technological iceberg.

Yes, I know you can say that about almost any period in history, and yes, archaeology talks about how flint axes were made, how bone tools were made, how Roman tiles were made. But there’s something about the archaeology of the industrial revolution that binds discussion of material and process that much closer together.

Comics – a medium explicitly concerned with sequence – has increasingly felt like the natural way to illustrate this link between material and process. I feel like I’ve been able to combine a wide range of visual modes – narratives of process, cutaways, diagrams, reconstruction, etc. – into a consistent visual whole using comics as a mechanism which actively structures the visual delivery of this diverse content.

And as an archaeological illustrator, this is what I’ve been looking for: a medium which can make sense and render consistent the many different modes of visual exposition on which archaeology relies. This – perhaps even more than story-telling, even more than speech-bubbles, panels, gutters or even sequence itself – embodies the potential which comics offers to archaeology. And it is this which I’m going to be exploring more in my next archaeological comics project about archaeology on Palau.

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Return to Middleport

More Middleport Pottery People! Art for Middleport Pottery Visitors Centre, 2015.

I’ve been back to Middleport Pottery Factory this past fortnight – well, on the drawing board, at least. I’ve had a request for several more portraits of nineteenth-century pottery occupations, as well as two more diagrams showing mould-making processes.

Paintress, Printer, Mould-Maker and Engraver (you could turn this into a deck for an industrially-themed game of Happy Families) are now added to the twenty others I did last year. It’s been good fun to return to the project, even if only for a handful of illustrations. I’ll be heading up to Middleport later in the spring, to see how the new Visitors Centre looks – and to see all my illustrations installed!

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Thinking of the Future

An Approximation of a Moment – artwork inspired by TAG papers given by Helen Wickstead and Louise Adkins

I managed to fit in a one-day visit to TAG [Theoretical Archaeology Group] conference last month, dropping in on the session on Art and Archaeology on the final day. It was the kind of session that only seems to pop up at TAG, and it was typical TAG: diverse and surprising by turns. There were papers by performance artists, archaeo-sound reconstructionists, and art historians and even some archaeologists. I didn’t give a paper, but I did run an abbreviated workshop in the afternoon on experimentality in archaeological narrative. TAG is always full of the unexpected, and this year was no exception. The conversations I had at the conference gave me an opportunity to review all the things I’ve done with comics and archaeology over the past year and think about where this is all heading.

Looking back over 2014, I feel as if it was a year in which I did a lot of practical things with comics in archaeology – from the Middleport Pottery panels to the comics journal I wrote on Carriacou during the summer, the informational comic on archaeology for the Mustique Company, and the panels for the Grenada National Museum and the panoramic comic panel for the Museum of London.

I’ll certainly be doing a lot more of those kind of comics throughout the coming year, but 2015 feels like a year of slightly different projects – some of them exploring new ways to use comics in archaeology beyond the informational handout and the interpretation panel. To start with, I have a couple of articles and papers coming out discussing not just the application of comics in archaeology, but its as-yet untapped potential. I’ll get a chance to explore these themes in more detail, as I’m also going to be writing a book about archaeology and comics, and I’ve got several longer-format works in the publication pipeline. There are also several collaborative projects lined up for this year, giving me the chance to work with other people using comics in new and surprising ways. 2015 looks like being a year to start building on all the practical and theoretical stuff I’ve been doing with comics and archaeology over the past four years.

More on all this as the year progresses. All in all, 2015 looks like it’ll be an interesting year – interesting and busy!

 

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Process vs Narrative

“The Killing of the Iceman” – Alex Maleev and Mariel Furlong for National Geographic (Nov. 2011) via visualjournalism.com

During the course of my work at Middleport Pottery, I’ve been musing over the distinction and/or difference between “comics” and informational graphics which use sequences of illustrations. I’ve been producing both recently, using them in different ways to explain and explore archaeological information, and I think I can now see some kind of concrete distinction between the two. As I’ve said elsewhere, this sort of thing can quickly become a somewhat empty, semantics-driven exercise – but I think doing some of this unpicking can lead to something useful.

Informational graphics use sequences of images to define a process. I’ve talked about airline safety cards before now – a good example of sequences of illustrations used to define a process – and many archaeological graphics (phase diagrams, etc.) have much in common with airline safety cards. We’re all familiar with communicating archaeology in terms of the description of a process. If you work on a site where there are visitors, if you’ve ever been involved with community or public archaeology work, or if you’ve even had to orientate new team-members to a trench, then you know these sorts of explanations: this wall was constructed in this way, for this reason, before that wall and after this one.

But read that explanation again: not only is it process, it’s narrative as well. As often as not, archaeological data is recounted as a process embedded within a story. I think in archaeology we can talk about information using sequence as both a function of both process and narrative.

If that’s the case, then it reinforces a suspicion I’ve held for a while: which is that comics might be more native to traditions of recounting archaeological information than is supposed. While archaeological visualisation seem to often rely on images that depict sequence as a function of process (think of phase plans, for example), the narrative is in there (again: think of phase plans), only often backgrounded or implied. If comics are about using sequences of images to construct a narrative, then might “comics” in archaeology help make this hidden or implicit narrative quality more visible – even within images which are ostensibly about process?

For an excellent published example of exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about, I refer you to the comic about the killing of “Ötzi”, published in National Geographic in 2012. Here is a comic acting primarily as a sequence of images illustrating process, but in fact bringing in a narrative quality which expands the nature of the information being communicated. This comic remains, I believe, a singular published example of the potential of comics in archaeology to successfully create a sequential image which blends both process and narrative.

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Bottle Rocket

Just about ready for launch. Bottle Oven cutaway graphic for Middleport Pottery.

Phew! It’s been a long month, but this is the last week of the Middleport Pottery job, and all the graphics are just about complete.

My latest set of graphics for Middleport Pottery has been some building cutaways and site plans. The largest of these so far is a cutaway of the pottery’s surviving “Bottle Oven” – the impressive, bottle-shaped structure that housed the main kiln. Originally, Middleport had six of these, and for almost a century the whole of the Potteries region was peppered with these distinctive structures. Their function and operation was, once upon a time, familiar to anyone living in the Midlands; nowadays, most people would be hard-pressed to put a name to them, let alone say what they did.

I’m doing the cutaway in “comic style” – that is: with the same linework and colouring as I’ve used in all of the comics I’ve done at Middleport. The Bottle Oven cutaway, for example, will be visually related to the comics, but is a static image, not a comic. Or is it?

As I’ve been drawing the cutaway, I’ve been thinking more about the connections between detailed visual information and comics, and I was reminded of Herge’s elaborate drawings of the moon rocket in Destination Moon. His rendering of this piece of technology – though obviously part of a “comic” – has all the qualities of a static cutaway. A few labels, and Herge’s panels of Calculus’ tour through the rocket would look right at home in The Eagle. Indeed, the inclusion of plans and elevation drawings within the book edition (I’m assuming these weren’t part of the original serialised publication), make it clear that Herge wants the reader to understand the structure of the moon rocket, not just look at it.

So is this comic as informational diagram? Or is it informational diagram as comic? Herge’s objective was clearly to add a certain amount of “apparent verisimilitude” to the story as an exercise in world-building; in the same way that maps and historical background function within other stories (the historical leaflet in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, for example).

But here’s a question: does this trick the other way around? Does starting with information and moving towards “comics” add what might be called “apparent narrative” to a diagram? Does the use of comics-styled linework and colour in my bottle oven cutaway also function as a kind of world-building, giving what might otherwise be a fairly dry visual a sense of story and context?

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Jobs for the Boys (and Girls)

What’s My Line? Middleport Pottery occupations, c. 1910 (J.G. Swogger/MB Heritage Mgt/Princes Regeneration Trust, 2014)

I’m coming up to the halfway mark in the Middleport Pottery job; I’m in the process now of inking- and colouring-in the 1910 occupation “portraits” and comics. One of the things that we wanted to make sure we included in this series of illustrations was a real feeling for how many child labourers a pottery like Middleport employed. There were jobs which were primarily the occupation of the children: Thimble-pickers and Mould Runners, for example. But, in fact, each job usually had several young assistant-level positions attached to it.  Children and young adults were employed in these positions not just to assist, but to learn. One of the things has struck me most powerfully about the context of these jobs is their place within a continuum of employment. No one could claim that employment conditions in 1910 were equitable or even safe, but there is a great sense in the documentation that having a job in a place like Middleport Pottery meant very much being part of a community – one that would potentially offer employment from childhood to old age. It’s perhaps no surprise that it is from conditions like these that the idea of job-based social welfare developed – but also, by contrast, thought-experiments about the ultimate impact of the same conditions that underpin works like The Time Machine. Looking back from the vantage point of more than a century – through the labour experiences of the twenties, the forties, the seventies and the nineties, post-war, post-Welfare State, post-“austerity” – it is hard to know whether to pity or envy these factory workers their conditions.

Anyway, socio-economic musings aside, you can see from these illustrations that we’re trying to give a good impression of the way that places like Middleport Pottery offered employment not just to men, not just to boys, but to women and girls as well – another important element of that “continuum of employment”. In this centenary year of the Great War, there’s emphasis on the role that both world wars played in “bringing women into the workplace”. But Middleport clearly shows that in many important respects, they were already there. Although it’s outside the scope of this present project, it would be interesting to do some research – and some visual presentation – specifically about the place of women within the history of the Burleigh Pottery company, and within the potteries in general. Indeed, I’d be interested in knowing (and showing) more about the presence of groups like the disabled, the elderly and ethnic minorities in the potteries before the Second World War.

See? Once more this is why I’m finding this foray into industrial archaeology so fascinating – and so rewarding: it’s not impossible to ask those kinds of questions about the Neolithic, but it is a lot harder.

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Fasten Your Seatbelts

Rough draft for “Making a Plate Mould” graphic. Comic or not?

I’ve been working on a new series of graphics for Middleport Pottery – this time focusing on the complicated process of making the moulds that are used to make different kinds of ware. Each piece of pottery had its own mould, and Middleport retains a fascinating (and, I think, virtually unique) archive of almost 20,000 moulds ranging from the 1890s to the present day.

Making the moulds involves several intermediary positive and negative moulding stages, creating a “Block” from the “Model”, a “Face” and “Bottom” to a “Case Mould” and then ultimately a series of “Working Moulds”.

The challenge has been to come up with a way of explaining this process to an audience which will be largely unfamiliar with the idea of multiple mould-making. The intermediary moulds – the “Block”, “Master Case Mould”, etc. – are visually striking, but the relationship to the finished piece of pottery is often difficult to make out. My graphics will form part of an explanatory “chain” involving interactive and hands-on display, photographs and video footage, all helping to unravel the mould-making process.

In an attempt to make drawings of this complex process clear and uncluttered, I’ve used as my inspiration airline safety cards. Each step of the process has its own panel, with further boxes and labels creating graphic groups relating to each stage along the way (“Making the Block”, “Making the Case Mould”, etc.). Despite their diagrammatic, information-based approach, I think these are genuine comics: there’s the required interdependence of word and image, and a definite sequence of events. But I’m still not entirely clear in my own mind about the exact relationship between something that’s understood to be a “comic” and something more like an informational diagram. I’m not sure Edward Tufte’s ideas about information which has been “cartooned” are entirely applicable here – but Chris Ware’s diagrammatic approaches to storytelling might be. I’m not bothered about semantic distinction – I’m more interested in how visual mechanics operate to help communicate different kinds of narratives. Is there a “fuzzy” continuity between diagram and comic, or is there a sharp distinction – and is that distinction a function of the production or reception of the image? I think these are questions which are important when thinking about the use of comics in archaeology, as so much of our visualisation is so information-rich.

So do “informational comics” like these occupy a category of their own, half-way between diagram and comic? If so, what would it take to tip such a visualisation into one camp or the other?

Are airline safety cards comics – or not?

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Less Being More

“Glost Placer” – short comic for the Middleport Pottery project.

One of the series of illustrations I’m doing for the Middleport Pottery project are short, three-panel comics showing how various jobs at the nineteenth-century pottery were done. I’m calling these “comics”, but they lie stylistically somewhere in that grey and ill-defined zone between “comic” and “infographic”. Info-comic? I suppose it’s all semantics (pace, Edward Tufte), but I prefer to call these comics, however, since there’s a definite and intended sense of “sequence” to them. It’s not so evident here in this one about the Glost Placer, but in others in the series it’s much more obvious.

After I had designed these three-panel comics, I was reading The Ephemerist comics blog and realised that I’m following in the footsteps of greatness in compressing my comics in down to three panels! Maybe I was subliminally influenced by reading all those copies of Airboy Comics…

Actually, I know my three-panel approach was influenced by the short three-four panel sequences in the Usborne history books, which I devoured voraciously as a kid. The rounded-corner panels and the arrows in the present series are a little nod of acknowledgement to those info-comics! But the Ephemerist asks a pertinent question: how many panels do you need? There’s a tendency in graphic storytelling to allow the page-count free rein. But where info-comics are concerned, perhaps less really is more?

 

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Odd Jobs

“Placer” – illustration for Middleport Pottery Project, Burslem.

I knew almost nothing about the nineteenth-century manufacture of pottery before I started this Middleport Pottery project. I had no idea what Cod Placers did (something with fish, I assumed?), or what a Banjo Saggar was, or what you might cook up in a Bottle Oven. Like most early industries, the potteries developed a language all their own for jobs, material, tools and processes that were newly-invented. At one time, everyone in the Midlands would have know what a Saggar Maker’s Bottom Knocker was – and not just because they’d been watching 1950s television gameshows. But who nowadays can tell a Fettler from a Sponger? Who knows what a Blunger is? Or the difference between a Jiggerer and a Jollyer? And yet we all still use pottery – cups, plates, bowls, etc. – every day. It’s astonishing how quickly these specialist vocabularies become absorbed into everyday language – and how quickly they vanish from use once industrial patterns change.

The series of illustrations I’m doing as part of the Middleport Pottery project shows some of these potteries occupations, tools and processes. There’s a series of about 20 jobs portraits (like the Placer, here), a series of 20 short comics showing how each job was done, and a visual vocabulary of tools and equipment. Part of the great delight of this project, as I’ve mentioned before, is the chance to not only learn a lot more about the nineteenth-century manufacture of pottery, but to see many of those same jobs still being done with the same tools and in same way, at the Burleigh pottery works within the Middleport Pottery complex.

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The Muses Stream

Beautiful Toilets here doth the Minstrel scan,
All took his fancy, especially the Swan;
I breath’d the airs of other years, and did seem
To sail with th’ Immortal Swans adown ye Muses
stream.

From “Ode to Messers Burgess and Leigh, Earthenware Manufacturers”, by James Torrington Spencer Lidstone, 1866.

I suppose the best that can be said for this opening stanza, published in The Thirteenth Londoniad (1866) is that pottery really does inspire some people…

The above-referenced Messers Burgess and Leigh were Frederick Rathbone Burgess and William Leigh, who established a pottery firm bearing their names in 1862, operating out of the Central Pottery in Burslem (now demolished, but once standing behind the New Inn in the Market Place in Burslem). In 1889, they constructed a “model” pottery works on new ground alongside the Trent and Mersey Canal. The fresh site allowed them to build a complex of buildings in a logical and economic manner, with the manufacturing process dictating the layout and arrangement of the buildings.

It is this complex – the Middleport Pottery – which still survives, and which, since 1889, has been in operation under the Burgess & Leigh name. In 2009 the site received a grant from the Princes Regeneration Trust for the restoration of the nineteenth-century complex of buildings – including its surviving bottle oven.

Do you know what a fettler does? 

This is where I’ll be working for the next few months, producing comics and other graphics for the new interpretation and education centre at Middleport. I’ve described the place as a real gem – and so is the job. So often in archaeology one is working with a culture and way of life many, many times removed from the present day. Trying to get across social, technological and cultural concepts often thousands of years old to a contemporary audience can be a real challenge.

At Middleport, however, the historical and archaeological material stands directly alongside the contemporary processes on show in the modern factory. When we talk about a fettler, tissue transfer or thimbles in a nineteenth-century context, we can then point across the modern factory and show the same jobs, equipment and processes as an example.

The comics and graphics I’m producing will draw on this parallel – I’ll be working not only with the interpretation and presentation of the Victorian/Edwardian material, but also with their modern equivalents. There’s the usual site graphics to produce, but also a series of short comics and stand-alone comic graphics about the jobs and manufacturing processes in both 1889 and 2014.

I’ll use the phrase once more: a real gem of a project. It’s not often that one gets this kind of opportunity in archaeological visualisation. I don’t think I’ll manage to compose an ode to the Pottery’s toilets, but I certainly do feel inspired.

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