Ceramics Are Eternal: An Interview with Arkadiusz Szwed
Arkadiusz Szwed talks about thimbles from a 3D printer, whether porcelain will be produced by artificial intelligence, but also about the great responsibility associated with working with clay. Szwed is the originator and co-creator of the ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’ project about Poland’s Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory.
Anna Cymer (AC): ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’ is a long-term project presented in dozens of places around the world, including prestigious ones such as the Victoria & Albert Museum. It now also has its book version. But I want to go back to its origins. When you started working on it, did you consider it a scientific, artistic or educational project?
Arkadiusz Szwed (AS): From my perspective, it was an artistic work from the very beginning, a desire to tell a story that fascinated me and that I really wanted to share with others.
It started with a great excitement about the factory in Ćmielów, which amazed me when I visited it for the first time. In 2013, I started taking photos of the people working there – it was my first idea how to capture the uniqueness of this place and the employees who create it. These photographs were later hung in the main hall of the factory; their exhibition accompanied the opening of the Modus Design studio, or Ćmielów Design Studio, founded by Marek Cecuła; photos were also distributed to employees.
It was the first stage of development of this project, but an idea for its development was quickly born in my head. I was sure it had so much more potential. I shared my observations and emotions with anthropologist Ewa Klekot, because I knew that scientific support would be very useful in this idea. We got together perfectly, because Ewa was already a frequent visitor to the School of Form ceramics studio; she was interested in ceramics, so we joined forces. Ewa undertook to research the factory from the scientific and anthropological side, I created a specific manifesto – atypical, because I do not manifest my visions in it, but the fact of the existence of a ceramics factory and how it works, how it is organised, who creates it. This seemed particularly important to me, because apart from the fact that we know the products that come out of the factory and we see its chimneys, no one reflects on how it works, what is happening inside and who works there.
The more so because the factory in Ćmielów is not very mechanized – although some of the work is done by machines, people still play a key role here. They take care of the quality of products, their cleaning, finishing, glazing, painting, etc.
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‘Trace of Man’, manufacture of dishes, Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory S.A., photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: Out of artistic and scientific passion, a project was created that has great educational value, shows viewers something that not only they are not aware of, but also a world to which they do not have access on a daily basis.
AS: This project turned out to be educational for me too! When I joined it, I already had experience in working with ceramics, had completed various projects, and had participated in exhibitions. It seemed to me that I knew a lot about this field. When it collided with the world of the factory and the people who work in it – they have extensive experience, great knowledge and sense of the material, they are fast, precise and delicate at the same time – it turned out that I still know very little about creating ceramics. Meeting people in the factory was a great school of profession, a verification of my skills. It was my personal discovery of the uniqueness of the world of the factory and its employees that formed the basis of the Human Footprint project; I just knew that it cannot end with just the photos I took there. With time, it turned out that my idea became interesting and revealing for viewers both in Poland and abroad.
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‘Trace of Man’, manufacture of dishes, Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory S.A., photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: How did the cooperation with the employees go? Did your actions meet with the favor of the heroes of the project?
AS: From the very beginning, we received a lot of trust from the factory management; they let us act without knowing what the effect of our work would be. It was a bit more difficult to enter the world of factory workers – we had to earn their trust, because after all, we were strangers who came to watch their work. It was easier for me: I come from Końskie, a town in the Świętokrzyskie region (the same city in which Ćmielów is located). Even if I knew the regional dialect, besides, I was genuinely interested in their work. I wasn’t like a tour participant who walks through the factory, takes pictures and disappears, but I really wanted to know the production process. I had the opportunity and wanted to talk to everyone, not just the workers delegated to our project. The real relationship between us began to develop when they started to pass on knowledge to me – it was a real ‘click’, after which I was ‘one of them’. I was accepted.
AC: How did the employees perceive the final effect of your work?
AS: While at the production stage our cooperation started to go very well quite quickly, the employees did not see much value in the product that resulted from it.
But it is easy to understand: with capricious and difficult-to-process ceramics, it is extremely difficult to create the perfect object. It is said that ‘high-premium’ products in this field of production are only about five percent. The goal of the factory workers is to ‘tame’ the material and achieve this so difficult-to-obtain perfection; each gesture is an effort to achieve perfection. Thanks to us, on these flawless things there are illegible traces that are not geometric, arranged, do not create a pattern and decoration, are completely inconsistent with what is the task of employees on a daily basis.
What is more, the traces left by the artists’ fingers on the dishes were imperceptible to them, they were revealed only during the last firing. Previously, the cobalt sulfate we used was absorbed into the material and remained invisible. All the more so, the employees did not feel that they had any influence on the appearance of these marks. This, of course, was what we wanted it to be – a true record of their touch – but it was more difficult for them to accept it.
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‘Trace of Man’, manufacture of dishes, Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory S.A., photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
While planning to capture the traces of people’s hands creating the vessels, I made a surprising discovery. It turned out that not only fingers are a tool of work here, as I had previously been convinced of. Before leaving for Ćmielów, I printed the handles for small sponges on a 3D printer, which – as I imagined – each employee would put on like thimbles on their fingers, and these sponges would leave a mark on the dishes. It soon turned out that my theoretical assumption has nothing to do with reality, because factory workers use many other parts of their hands as often as their squares. My idea turned out to be useless and it was necessary to quickly come up with a new one. Then we reached for cotton gloves, which could already be soaked in the dye, and thanks to this, the traces that appeared on the dishes did not come only from the fingers themselves. There was another advantage of this solution: putting on the gloves takes much less time than ten thimbles.
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Spread from the book ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’, publisher: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2021, photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: Your project has been presented abroad many times. How was it received there? Did you learn anything new?
AS: The great advantage of the People from the Porcelain Factory exhibition is that it communicates a lot of data in a simple and legible way. It allows you to discover or see something that you cannot see on a daily basis. Because when using a chair, we know how it was made: we see the grain of the wood; we see how the boards were cut; there are screws, joints, its structure is recognizable, so we can easily understand the process of its production. In the case of ceramics, this is not the case – we do not know how it was made. Looking at a porcelain cup, it does not come to mind that the material from which it was made was once fluid. We do not know how this plastic material is formed, what is done with it to eventually become an object. Just as we don’t know that humans do it, that this cup or plate previously passed through a number of pairs of human hands before it got its final form. I have heard from many people in different countries that thanks to the exhibition they only understood and noticed this process. Moreover, we have shown that a product manufactured in a factory on a mass scale is also a handicraft – made by people with extraordinary, unique skills that are acquired over the years.
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Spread from the book ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’, publisher: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2021, photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: It was probably not easy – to translate a project that had been going on for several years into a book publication?
This process was only successful thanks to teamwork, thanks to the fact that a group of people gathered here, each of whom contributed something important. The very idea to create the publication came from Aneta Prasał-Wiśniewska from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Then Kasia Kubicka joined us, who can design great books, and who very quickly understood what the project is about, and therefore how to tell it in paper form. Kasia was also able to balance and combine our, mine and Ewa Klekot’s, often contradictory ideas. And everything was glued together by Agnieszka Jacobson, who coordinated all the elements – texts, photos, the entire narrative, the story we wanted to present here. Thanks to this, the book has also become an independent existence, it can function separately, independently of the exhibitions. Thanks to this joint work, we managed to create a valuable object – because in this book every element is important, including the type of paper, cover, colors, specific spine, red cards with quotes and tracing papers with photos. All this corresponds with the story presented here, with a story about people from the factory. I believe that we have also managed to transfer the homage that we wanted to pay to the employees of the factory in Ćmielów on the pages of the book.
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Spread from the book ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’, publisher: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2021, photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: In the book, you can see a selection of the portraits you took of the factory workers. It is noteworthy that most of them have 20 or 30 years of work experience in this one plant. This is why their extraordinary experience and efficiency that you talked about, but do young people come to the factory?
AS: In the past, successive generations of entire families worked in a factory (this or any other). This was partly due to the fact that the factory simply gave jobs to the inhabitants of a given region, and a good job, because it also offered education, holidays, childcare, trips, cultural events, etc. Today, no one is so attached to the place – you are no longer ‘condemned’ to work in this nearby factory, which is no longer such an attractive employer. Many people with whom I spoke in Ćmielów said that they sent their children to study so that they would not have to work in the factory.
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‘Trace of Man’, manufacture of dishes, Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory S.A., photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: Does this mean that the future of the factory is at stake because there will be no one to work in it?
This threat is not only related to humans. Many changes have taken place in the world that directly affect the production of ceramics. Let us recall what weddings used to look like in the past: each young couple received a 12-person ceramic dinner service as a gift, sometimes with a coffee service. Today, when I ask my students who has a vase at home, they look at me in amazement. When I ask a question about the mug from which they drink coffee at home, it turns out that these are random items, advertising gadgets and freebies, mugs bought in large chain stores, in supermarkets. Few people attach importance to it. Who consciously buys a vase today?
This is a great change – the presence of ceramic objects in our lives and our attitude towards them. In response to this phenomenon, present all over the world, the Ćmielów Design Studio was created, which releases short, modern series for a more aware and demanding client who appreciates the originality and quality of the design. But there aren’t many people like that. In order to support and complement each other on the increasingly difficult market, the factories are grouping (just like Chodzież, Ćmielów and Lubiana are joined today); plants that do not modernise, collapse, but this modernization today means reaching for full mechanisation, including artificial intelligence, because modern robots are able to imitate human gestures better and better.
And there is also the phenomenon of the incredible overproduction of things, which is of course not only in ceramics, which is paramount to these issues. We live in an age where it is less and less surreal to say that it is cheaper to buy a new garment than to wash the one you have! So we cannot help but ask ourselves, do we really need new things all the time?
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Porcelain factory in Ćmielów, photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
AC: At the same time, the fashion for ceramics continues – new studios are constantly being created. Many people are eager to learn to create clay products. Not only is craftsmanship appreciated, but people also want to make them themselves.
AS: This passion for ceramics is like sitting by the fire and telling stories. Nobody does it on a daily basis, but when camping, such behavior makes a magical sense and makes everyone happy. It is a primal need that, in my opinion, is also triggered by ceramics. This is the first durable material tamed by man – maybe we still need contact with the material, the possibility of shaping it, making it something practical or aesthetic? This fashion for ceramics is cool, but it is worth remembering how much responsibility comes with it. I try to make students aware of it: it is quite easy to learn the basics of working with ceramics, but it becomes demanding only at some stage, when you want to achieve a higher level of effectiveness, durability and precision. At first, it is easy to be pleased that you can create various items. But – this is too rarely mentioned –ceramics is one of the most durable materials... our works will outlive our great-great-grandchildren! After all, archaeologists are still digging up clay objects from distant eras, we know the history of ancient Greece and Rome, among others from earthenware. We should remember this when we sit down at the potter’s wheel.
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‘Trace of Man’, manufacture of dishes, Ćmielów and Chodzież Porcelain Factory S.A., photo: Arkadiusz Szwed
There is another aspect to this matter: kaolin deposits are not infinite. The Chinese have already closed their exports; those that are in Europe are not yet running out, but the material is not so pure anymore. Shouldn’t we also remember this? Worn, unnecessary ceramics are only suitable for hardening roads. It is not recyclable, and it will not get stale – it is practically eternal. It is worth being aware of this.
Originally written in Polish, Aug 2021, translated by Culture.pl, Sep 2021
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