In 2018, I went to Chelsea Space to see The Democratic Dish: Mintons Secessionist Ware, an exhibition drawn from the collection of art historian and former Tate curator Simon Wilson and his wife Alessandra, alongside material from the Minton Archive.
I left wanting to make something.
The exhibition explored Mintons Secessionist Ware, produced in the early twentieth century and characterised by extraordinary combinations of stylised plant forms, sweeping outlines, colour and abstraction. Designed for industrial production and a wider market, these were objects in which some of the experimental visual language of European Art Nouveau entered everyday domestic life.
I was particularly drawn to their swirling compositions and the relationship between graphic outline and washes of colour. They reminded me simultaneously of painting, pattern and print.
That movement between categories felt familiar.
Looking at Collections
My relationship with Chelsea Space had already developed through The Geometrics, the project I co-curated with Daisy McMullan through my Slow Textiles Group.
Donald Smith, then Director of Chelsea Space, had attended The Geometrics, and the project had brought us into conversation with the history of British modernist design. With Daisy’s help, we had included Frederick Etchells’s 1913 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Rug in our research and catalogue.
I continued attending talks at Chelsea Space because they were excellent places to encounter collections, curators and ideas.
During The Democratic Dish, I attended the accompanying seminar, Collecting, Making & the Place of Ceramics in Art & Society Today. Seeing images of Art Nouveau, the Belle Époque, Japonisme, painterly slipware and pastoral decoration made me think about how I might respond to this historical material in my own visual language.
The exhibition wasn’t simply something I had looked at.
It had given me something to work with.
A Methodology Moving Between Museums
Looking back, I realise that the process I used to make Cloud Buds was not entirely new. It developed directly from ways of working I had explored through my teaching and participatory projects at the V&A.
There, museum collections often became starting points rather than endpoints. I would encourage participants to look closely at an object, draw from it and then use digital tools to transform those observations into new patterns and images. Historical objects could move through contemporary technologies and emerge in another material language.
The process often followed a simple trajectory:
museum object → observation → drawing → digital transformation → pattern → new material form
At Chelsea Space, I found myself using essentially the same methodology within my own studio practice.
This time the starting point was Mintons Secessionist Ware.
I studied the exhibition catalogue and became particularly interested in two designs illustrated in Mintons’ 1901 catalogue. Starting from their floral and swirling forms, I made two large pastel drawings, allowing colour and movement to fill the paper before deciding how the compositions might develop.
I called them Cloud Buds and Blooms Blur.
I then transferred the drawings into Photoshop, where I distorted, intensified and reorganised them before fitting each composition to the prescribed eleven-inch circular format of a ceramic charger.
The sequence had become:
Minton object → looking → drawing → Photoshop → ceramic transfer → plate
What interests me now is that this methodology could travel between museums and institutions.
At the V&A it had been largely pedagogical and participatory: collections became catalysts through which other people could make something new.
At Chelsea Space, I turned the same process back onto my own work.
The collection changed. The institution changed. The technology and material outcome could change. But the underlying proposition remained remarkably consistent: looking at historical objects could become an active form of making.
A museum collection did not have to be something encountered passively or reverentially. It could become raw material for another visual thought.
The Democratic Dish
Curator Cherie Silver developed The Democratic Dish: Transfer Project with ceramic artist Amy Hughes as a participatory extension of the exhibition. Visitors were invited to create designs responding to the ceramics in Simon and Alessandra Wilson’s collection or material in the Minton Archive.
More than 150 designs were submitted.
Four were selected by Grayson Perry, Donald Smith and Amy Hughes to be transformed into ceramic transfers and applied to plates.
Cloud Buds was one of them.
I remember receiving a film of Grayson Perry discussing the entries. Looking at mine, he said:
“This person must be a professional… well done, Emma!”
It was funny, generous and enormously encouraging.
But what interested me just as much was what happened next.
When a Painting Becomes a Plate
When Cloud Buds was selected for The Democratic Dish: Transfer Project, the process acquired another stage.
The digital image became transferable.
Three of the selected artists spent a day in the Ceramics Studio at Chelsea College of Arts with curator Cherie Silver and ceramic artist Amy Hughes, learning how our images could become ceramic decals.
Suddenly Cloud Buds wasn’t simply a pastel drawing or a digital image.
It could leave paper and screen and attach itself to another material surface.
This is something I increasingly recognise when looking back across my practice. I have rarely been particularly interested in preserving strict boundaries between painting, drawing, pattern, cloth, digital image and object.
I am more interested in what happens when an image moves between them.
A museum object can become a drawing.
A drawing can become a digital pattern.
A digital pattern can become a ceramic transfer.
And a ceramic surface can become another kind of painting.
What else can a painting become?
Decoration and the Democratic Object
Looking back, I am also interested in the title The Democratic Dish.
Simon Wilson traced it to a paper he presented in 1992 about Mintons Secessionist Ware and the relationship between Art Nouveau pottery and the mass market.
That idea matters.
Decoration is sometimes treated as something peripheral to serious art—as surface, embellishment or something applied after the important decisions have been made. Yet the Minton objects suggested something very different. Pattern, colour and ornament carried modern visual ideas into people’s homes through objects intended for use.
That relationship between the experimental and the everyday has interested me throughout my work.
A painting doesn’t necessarily have to remain on a wall.
An image can inhabit cloth, clothing, architecture, animation or a plate.
And once it does, a different audience encounters it.
An Ecology of Encounters
Seen this way, Cloud Buds belongs to a much longer chain of encounters.
My work at the V&A taught me something about looking at collections as an active process. Chelsea Space gave that methodology another context. Minton supplied another historical language. Digital technology enabled another transformation. Ceramics supplied another surface.
None of these encounters simply reproduced the object that came before.
Each allowed an image to change.
This is one reason I continue to value museums, galleries, talks and collections not simply as places where finished art is displayed, but as part of the ecology through which new work comes into being.
An encounter with an object can produce another object.
A historical pattern can generate a contemporary painting.
A teaching methodology can become a studio methodology.
And a way of working developed in one museum can travel into another institution and emerge in an entirely different material form.
Cloud Buds began with looking.
Then the image moved.
Project
The Democratic Dish: Transfer Project
Chelsea Space / Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London
2018–2019
Cloud Buds, 2018
Pastel drawing developed digitally and produced as a ceramic transfer on an eleven-inch charger
Selected by Grayson Perry, Donald Smith and Amy Hughes from more than 150 public submissions.
Transfer Project conceived by curator Cherie Silver with Amy Hughes in conjunction with The Democratic Dish: Mintons Secessionist Ware, drawn from the Alessandra and Simon Wilson Collection and the Minton Archive.
Cloud Buds was exhibited as part of Chelsea Café Project #31 alongside selected designs by Eva Scott, Ella Rose Caton and Melissa Newbery-Welcome.
Further information: Chelsea Space Public Programme Archive — Café Project #31: Emma Neuberg