A collaborative project through aticstudios.com

This body of work is by long term collaborators Angela Tait and Ian Clegg. The artists work together on creative and educational projects and both work and live in the North West. They are actively involved in research and both lecture at a variety of Northern universities.

Northern Willow is an ongoing project which has been developed from a position of curiosity about how location might shape cultural identity. The traditional willow pattern was originally brought from the Orient, partly to satisfy the Victorian lust for the exotic. The images and techniques were adopted, copied and mythologised in the West into the generic and multiple iterations we see and understand today. This re-appropriation distorts our understanding of place. How does a typically Eastern aesthetic become a very visible marker of Englishness?

Northern Willow is a reimagining. The artists reinterpret the pattern with local imagery, using the process to think through local identity with a wide ecological lens. The apple trees and factories sit alongside the Manchester Ship Canal and Jodrell bank in playful distorted symmetry with the weeping willows and pagodas of its ubiquitous ancestor. The support for this imagery, not mass-produced earthenware plates and platters, but handmade, fine porcelain casts of disposable crockery. Paper plates, cardboard cups and tinfoil trays. Each seemingly similar but with unique anomalies courtesy of the making process. This misuse of materials giving more than a knowing nod to the current discourses surrounding recycling and the ongoing - sometimes heart-breaking - daily images of the earth’s increasing burdens.