Carrying Capacity

“Emilie makes pots that draw our attention to the politics in the everyday.” Sara Roberts

Emilie was invited to spend the year working between the royal Chatsworth Estate, Derbyshire- home of the Duke of Devonshire, and Manor Estate, a post war council housing development in central Sheffield. Once both Cavendish land these estates could not be more different today.

Beginning the residency as austerity took hold in the UK Emilie used the symbol of the Harvest Jug as connected to food, harvest and, in sharing ale, the meeting point between land owner and worker. The Greek creation story of the Five Ages of Man, depicted in a painted ceiling in the Great Chamber, and man’s decent into the Iron Age, along with the an essay partly funded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, proposing that “global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution” became the research focus. Emilie Taylor was particularly struck by the implications of the article, and specifically by a phrase used in the report: ‘carrying capacity’, clearly a resonant term for a maker of ceramic vessels.

The project culminated in a display of jugs made by Emilie exhibited in the Great Chamber at Harvest time, and a guided walk from Chatsworth to Manor Estate where invited guests, (including Architechts, Planners, Debt Workers, Youth Workers and Curators) journeyed and talked together before sharing a Harvest Meal.

Read an Essay by Sara Roberts (featured in Ceramic Review) describing the project here.