Install and Exhibition Documentation
AirSpace Gallery
September 2013

TOTEM is a major new installation and accompanying publication by Corinne Felgate. Comprised of a series of floor to ceiling totems created from discarded biscuit and hand cast pieces of Spode produced on the company’s former site, the work explores notions of power, success and failure embodied in the rise & fall and ultimate resurrection of the British ceramic industry.

Drawing on the motives of the Lunar Society, which originated in Stoke-on-Trent, Felgate has embraced the notion of collective artistic dialogue and extended the invitation to exhibit at AirSpace to three artists whose practices and ideologies she has an affinity with and admiration for; Florence Peake, Camilla Emson and Marcus Boyle With no prescriptive or obligatory rules of collaboration in any forced or formal sense, the artists seek to make transparent and expand the collaborative manner in which she often works.

Within the context of the "Totem", each of the invited artists explores the notion of the emblematic, iconic and spiritual in relation to Ceramics and Stoke on Trent, through the production of both new and collaborative work, and in the process, forming a dialogue round the main installation.