Part of Art Walk Project’s Land Mark programme, this residency was based on the former site of the Buchan & Co Thistle potteries in Portobello, Edinburgh. It focused on a group of women who worked as decorators for the potteries in the late 1960s. Mostly in their teens, the women painted thistles, among other motifs, in workshops near the present-day site of the kilns. Each decorator had her own mark that she would put on the bottom of any pottery she decorated. In 1972, Buchan & Co closed the Portobello site and moved to Crieff. Some of the women ceased to be decorators at around this point, either through redundancy or moving onto to married life. The kilns are now the only physical traces of the pottery on the site: the history and work of the decorators is not visible.

Consequently ‘The Decorators’ attempted to make visible this social and gendered history through the final artworks on location. By paying attention to voice, photograph, painted pot and the mark on its base, the residency produced a series of events and site-specific artworks that conveyed the significance of stories of the decorators, and how in their own subtle way, they continue to leave their mark on the Portobello landscape.

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