Some Jobs About Which The School Careers Officer Failed To Inform Me

According to The Telegraph (All Fired Up: The Future of Pottery, 26.01.2011) Emma Bridgewater arrived in The Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent) in 1985.  Desperately seeking a manufacturer for her own pottery designs, she found the pottery industry on its knees: the consequence of 'bad 1970s-style management'. Though she managed, at that time, to find a manufacturer, that particular maker of pots went bankrupt in 1992. Bridgewater, in turn, bought the factory and, in doing so, secured the jobs of the 35 members of staff already employed there.  Bridgewater now enjoys international success with what David Nicholls, Design Editor of The Telegraph, calls her 'friendly, sponge-painted tableware designs'. Her 'signature piece' as Tiffany Daneff writes in Patterns of Success (see Saga website, 20.02.2012) remains the polka-dot mug, 600 of which 'leave the factory in Stoke-on-Trent every week'.  Apparently, every mug 'goes through 54 different hand-applied processes before it’s finally ready'.  


I neither know, nor care, what the other 53 processes are, but what about the person who gets to place the dots on the tableware? Reading between the lines of the Saga article, it helps if you're a local; the author claims that Bridgewater has saved for the nation - and the international dinner-set market - skills that would otherwise have been lost. I concur; dabbing a sponge on a piece of biscuit-fired earthenware doesn't sound as accomplished as some of the previous decorative endeavours enjoyed by The Potteries.  I'm thinking Wedgwood and John Flaxman. But, it's a continuation of a regional tradition. (It would seem all professions have experienced some form of dumbing down.)


I want that job. Five colours placed seven times on each mug - randomly (which means 'unique'). The mug-painter even gets to initial her work.  


What is 'Art' but an identifiable image by an identifiable person with an identifiable style?  I refer you to Michel Houellebecq's latest novel: The Map And The Territory ( 2011): 'the great painters of the past were considered such when they had developed a world view that was both coherent and innovative, which means that they always painted in the same way, using the same methods and operating procedures to transform the objects of the world into pictorial ones'. (19)


Dots have served the art world well, from Pointillism to Baldersari to Damian Hirst.


And, of course, Hoeullebecq and Bridgewater both owe something to Hirst. If the careers officer had told me about the possibility of painting polka dots for a profession, I could have been an artist.