TYPECAST: Ceramics as a Messenger of Social Change

Manchester School of Art

by Jenny Walker and Eleanor Simms

Past Project

TYPECAST was a European wide project about linking the arts with people in early recovery from substance use by working with ceramic materials, skills, processes and other materials.

We want to generate new possibilities for people in recovery by challenging and changing attitudes.

Over two years, the project has worked with artists, European centres of ceramic excellence and other cultural agencies in the UK, Ireland, Holland, Sicily, Spain and Turkey. The project has improved the lives of people and communities in recovery by supporting greater visibility and by providing innovative, arts based social re-integration opportunities.

Each partner country delivered a series of artist-led residencies looking at notions of community and personal heritage, how these co-existing themes can support new identities and a more inclusive sense of voice.

Led by artist makers and educators Jenny Walker and Eleanor Simms and in partnership with the Manchester School of Art at MMU, TYPECAST – Manchester drew upon individual recovery narratives and identities, by exploring how material and object making can be used to articulate complex emotions and life events.

During the project, participants utilised personal histories and explored them in relation to the wider contexts of recovery, appreciating collective narratives, and their own personal development. Participants also expressed their understanding of significant events through visual self-evident means, developing a material vocabulary through clay and mixed media, communicating important aspects of their journey and supporting future aspirations and goals.

Participants for TYPECAST were recruited through LIFELINE Manchester.

An exhibition profiling the Manchester project's artworks was held in the Benzie Building, the Manchester School of Art at MMU from Monday 18th May – Friday 29th May 2015.

A selection of artefacts representative of the project partnership as a whole was feature within the 2015 British Ceramics Biennial held in September 2015 in Stoke-on-Trent.

TYPECAST was funded under the European Union’s Life Long Learning Program Grundtvig, which supports individuals and organisations involved in non-vocational adult education to participate in European training activities and by the European Social Fund, and the Skills Funding Agency.