Methods
John Grayson is a contemporary crafts maker with a long-established profile exhibiting nationally and internationally and has work in collections including Crafts Council UK and The National Trust. His practice and research interests combine. He investigates lost craft-making skills of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English West-Midland metalworking trades and re-contextualises their methods of industrialised metal forming and decorating to small-scale craft workshop production. Early work appropriated litho printing and press forming techniques of the tin toy and box industry to make printed tin automata. A deep engagement with enamel followed, first developed through Craftsense, an audience engagement project in 2004 for Bilston Crafts Gallery. Grayson's contribution to the project, Making Connections, was supported by an AHRB Small Grant, and technical assistance by industrial enameller manufacture Bilston and Battersea Enamels Ltd. Georgian Enamels: telling a New Narrative, a Grants for the Arts funded project, extended this work. It explored the value of damaged enamel artefacts in the Wolverhampton Arts and Culture collection through public object handling sessions and co-design, resulting in creating a new body of work that synthesised historical and contemporary narratives, and broken museum artefacts into new enamel. This experience shapes the research lens of this project.While the use of this empirical knowledge combined with the positioning of the craft maker both external to and at the centre of the research process could generate bias, the methodology used has been scrutinised through the doctoral examination process.
The research presented in Enamel | Substrate was undertaken using object-based analysis method and material enquiry through practice which had its origins in Prown and adapted in light of Hamling. Craftsmanship framed analysis of broken enamel objects in museums generated hypothesis of making processes. Data was triangulated with technical references identified in literature through historiography. Contemporary practice was used to develop material understanding and new knowledge on modes of making complex copper forms for enamelling by synthesising the historical processes with digitally printed press tools—plastic dies that could shape thin copper. This developed new modes of making by creating two contemporary craftworks, ‘The Brexiteers’. Finally, contemporary making was deployed to validate theories of the historical objects' production through eighteenth-century enamel replication. Concerning the Enamel | Substrate exhibition, as the project shifted from theoretical proposal to realisation, continuous review with gallery partners ensured that the exhibition met curatorial best practice in terms of interpretation, clarity and accessibility.
This methodology was extended to researching transfer-printing in the enamel trade. Process descriptions in technical writing of the time and secondary literature on transfer printing were synthesised with data generated by analysing misprinted eighteenth-century enamel snuffboxes in the Wolverhampton Arts and Culture collection. Theories on the processes used were explored through practice—engraving printing plates and printing on to enamel—to generate theories on the process and material parameters and the tacit skill deployed by the trade's craftspeople. Finally, this knowledge was used to revisit object analysis data, and technical descriptions in the literature to make sense of the process, and draw conclusions on how emergent printing took place within the trade. Methodological rigour was scrutinised in two ways. First, initial findings were presented for peer review through an oral conference paper delivered at the Printing for the workplace: industrial and business printing conference. Second, the completed research paper Imperfect printed enamel surfaces: interpreting marks of eighteenth-century Midland craftsmanship was blind peer-reviewed before publication in Midland History Journal.
