Clayground Collective is a team of creative practitioners who collaborate across artforms to engage the public, educators and researchers.
They work in different locations and spaces, responding to the specific qualities of each site; in collaboration with artists, ceramicists, poets, boatmen, librarians, graphic designers, photographers, film-makers, academics, musicians and archaeologists.
Three co-Directors run the collective and curate projects:
- Duncan Hooson, artist and educator specialising in clay.
- Claire West, arts and crafts professional.
- Julia Rowntree, writer and researcher.
The Collective's approach:
- Seeking advice from specialists in different fields to build on individual knowledge.
- Forging institutional partnerships to make things happen.
- Making projects possible with the support of specialist freelancers, advisers, volunteers and teams of students.
Contributor on key CSM projects:
T-Factor, 2020-2024
Central Saint Martins academics led the London pilot of T-Factor, a Horizon 2020 research project challenging the ‘waiting time’ in urban regeneration - the time between the development of the masterplan and the infrastructure being built - to show the value of building in culture and creative collaboration into development planning.
We worked with local communities to co-create meaningful temporary interventions that could inform permanent provision, and produce vibrant, inclusive hubs of urban (re)generation, social innovation and enterprise.
Design Transforms Borders, 2022
CSM Product, Ceramic and Industrial Design programme represented Central Saint Martins at New York Design Festival: 16-19 May 2022, with the Design Transforms Borders project, exploring themes around migration.
Read about our Design Transforms Borders project and its continuation in the Lethaby Gallery exhibition, Design Transforms '23.
Design Transforms and NYCxDesign 2019
The CSM Product, Ceramic and Industrial Design Design Transforms project launched in 2019, directly embedding in NYC Design Festival 2019.
Working with project partners we hosted community dinners and high profile panel discussions in live spaces.
Ceramic practice was used socially to anchor debates around learning, social equity and community responsibility; reflecting on how design education can meet social challenges.
22 Hands: British Ceramics Biennial Commission, 2019
For the British Ceramics Biennial 2019, Duncan Hooson and Stephanie Buttle came together to create 22 Hands: an exhibition, performance, workspace and intervention at the World of Wedgwood, home of the world-renowned Wedgwood factory and the award-winning Wedgwood Museum.
The artists transformed and animated an unused, anonymous courtyard — an indoor/outdoor space linking the Factory to the Museum — by introducing physical structures, pools of slip, platforms of moulds, a clay tunnel and soundscapes, bringing the space alive as an immersive theatre of making, where their creative process and thinking were made visible to the public.
Hooson and Buttle were joined by multimedia artist Tim Gray, working together to develop an audio sensory experience incorporating sound, text and found industrial machinery.
During the festival the artists were present enacting their creative process within the theatre space; while Buttle worked with the public and local professional dancers to develop a series of choreographed dance sketches that responded to the physical gestural movements of ceramic manufacturing and the Laban techniques that had so influenced Glenys Barton.
This original dance and movement work was simultaneously developed, choreographed and performed publicly throughout the live residency event.