The broken pottery shards that connect us to our past

Eventually, perhaps after a fall, a crack, or just due to changing fashion, they’d be tossed aside, thrown into the midden, broken and forgotten.

Artist Eva Jack has collected hundreds of pottery sherds (Image: Eva Jack)

For Glasgow-artist Eva Jack, the tiny transfer-printed broken pottery fragments she spotted emerging from the soil during walks around her West Lothian childhood home, were more than broken bits of old pottery.

Beneath layers of dirt were colourful flashes and a glimpse into another world: a corner of a grand sailing ship, the name of a long-gone fancy hotel, a lady’s face or chiselled torso of a Greek god.

Intrigued by the snapshot they offered of a time gone by, she uploaded her collection of broken domestic pottery into a fascinating digital project. Combining art and heritage, it struck a chord with walkers, beachcombers and the curious around the globe.

Before long, what started as a handful of broken pottery pieces grew to almost 1500, boosted by discovered fragments from as far away as the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the east coast of the United States of America, Greece and across the UK.

Once cleaned, tiny pieces of pottery can tell fascinating stories of social and industrial heritage (Image: Eva Jack)

Many of the tiny pieces date from the 19th century, when transfer printed pottery was booming and busy factories in Glasgow and Staffordshire began mass production for wares that be exported around the world.

Each piece raised a multitude of questions: where was it made, what story did that fragment of pattern once tell, who might have used it and how did it get there?

Now a carefully curated collection of around 400 of the most compelling pieces from her Fragment Found archive have been paired with words from 14 writers for a new book which aims to answer some of those questions and to tell new stories inspired by them.

Developed with independent publisher HumDrum Press, it will explore Scotland’s once booming pottery industry, and how found objects - even broken and discarded bits of crockery - connect us to the past, the land, and each other.

Alongside the book with its essays, interviews, poems, and short stories, will be a summer exhibition of fragments and artworks that take tiny details visible on certain sherds to imagine how the original pottery piece may have looked in its entirety.

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It will be hosted by community organisation Make It Glasgow at Stockingfield Bridge, in an area alongside the Forth and Clyde Canal that was once at the heart of the city’s pottery industry.

Currently operating from temporary accommodation, the long-term hope is to develop a Scottish pottery museum and ceramics manufacturing base in North Glasgow, reviving industrial ceramics skills that were once commonplace along the canal banks.

The city’s pottery industry boomed on the back of the new technology of transfer printing, which emerged in England in the mid-18th century. It opened the door to the production of affordable but highly decorative items which quickly found their way into homes across the country.

Artist Eva Jack has gathered hundreds of pieces of broken pottery from around the world (Image: Eva Jack)

The bulk of production was initially from the Staffordshire potteries. But soaring demand for the colourful and heavily patterned plates, pots and decorative items meant by the mid-19th century Glasgow had become a centre for transfer ware production.

The city had around 50 potteries of varying sizes. Some churned out huge quantities on an industrial scale, with towering brick chimneys and red hot kilns which transformed the city’s skyline.

One of the largest was Bells’ Pottery, also known as the Glasgow Pottery. Established in the 1830s by John and Matthew Preston Bell in Kyle Street, Cowcaddens, it originally produced sanitary ware and garden ornaments before becoming one of Scotland’s few producers of high quality porcelain.

Its vast range of transfer-printed patterns is said to have run into the hundreds, while its easy access to the Clyde meant Glasgow Pottery items travelled around the globe.

While at Finnieston, Robert Cochrane’s Verreville pottery run from 1845 until 1918, with a sister factory, Britannia, at St Rollox, employing hundreds of people.

Their porcelain and earthenware were sent to markets in North America and Asia, while Verreville established a warehouse in Belfast to handle the huge Irish market.

Broken pottery from the Fragment Found archive has inspired a new book (Image: Eva Jack)

Alongside the Glasgow pottery powerhouses such as Port Dundas, a huge stoneware pottery boasting 17 kilns and North British Pottery, on Dobbies Loan where Glasgow Caledonian University building’s now sit and a specialist in highly decorated jugs, were huge factories at places like Kirkcaldy and Portobello, from Cumnock Pottery in Ayrshire to Seaton Pottery in Aberdeen.

Today, however, little remains to show for their huge scale and the masses of people they employed.

Although the tiny sherds of pottery that make up the archive may seem hard to decipher, some factories had distinctive ‘signature’ styles.

Bell’s Pottery often produced patterns in green and red for its south east Asian customers. With different coloured borders and centres, exotic birds and plants, even a small piece can reveal its source.

In some cases, sherds reveal tiny print indicating royal events and news of the day, an Army regiment or the name of a hotel or business for which had been made, such as one fragment in the Fragments Found archive stamped ‘Kyles of Bute Hydropathic’.

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Measuring just a couple of centimetres, it tells a story of the Victorian craze for hydropathy, thought to cure a wide range of disease through rituals of bathing, showering, soaking, sweating, and wrapping.

As the craze took hold, Swanstonhill, a grand house in Port Bannatyne become a hydropathic hotel in 1855. It was a naval training base during the Second World War, closed in the 1970s and later demolished.

Other fragments in the archive include parts of commemorative crockery made for the 1888 International Exhibition of Science, Art & Industry in Glasgow, a tiny piece of commemorative Queen Victoria mug with the date ‘1887’ marking her Golden Jubilee, and some which are mini artworks in themselves showing birds in flight, wizened faces and delicate flowers.

Pottery sherds from the Fragment Found archive (Image: Eva Jack)

Eva’s eye has become so used to inspecting the sherds, that what looks to some to be just a brown smudge to her is instantly recognisable as a cow’s behind.

“I enjoy being able to identify them, but the ones I can’t identify are almost more interesting,” she says. “It opens up the scope to imagine what they could be.”

Other pieces tell a completely different story unrelated to their origins or their patterns.

“Someone sent me a piece a while ago that their neighbour had found 50 years ago when they were a child in Shetland,” she adds.

“It’s an image of a skeleton that looks like it’s on horseback. What I like most is that someone kept it for so long.

“Someone else sent in a collection that his daughter had started 50 years ago when she was a little girl.”

Picking 400 sherds from the 1500 in her archive meant sifting through a lot of blue and white willow patterns – the most common – in search of fragments that told a different story or ones that might fire the imagination.

The archive project has been supported by Creative Scotland and included input from Claire Blakey,  Curator of Modern Decorative Arts at the National Museum of Scotland, who helped unravel the stories behind some of the fragments.

Meanwhile, a new Kickstarter fundraiser is underway to help fund the book.

A pottery fragment found in Pumpherston, West Lothian. Made by Methven Pottery, Kirkcaldy, it comes from a pattern called Caller Herrin (Image: Eva Jack)

Eva says what started as a passing interest in a handful of sherds now spans a  range of interests, from industrial heritage to the stories individual patterns tell and the growing interest in mudlarking and beachcombing.

“It keeps growing arms and legs. There are pieces that have been found in places like Uruguay that look like Scottish spongeware. It which makes you wonder how it got there.

“There is such a global spread.

A page from Eva Jack's new book exploring the stories and heritage behind found piece of broken pottery (Image: Eva Jack)

“The publication of the book does not mark the end of the project,” she adds. “It’s a moment in time that brings together some of the finds submitted collated over the last four years and a chance to pause and dig deeper.”

To support the project or find out more about the book and exhibition, visit [Kickstarter] or follow @fragmentfound on Instagram.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fragmentfound/fragment-found-book