This book is an output from a two year residency (2019-21) which was part of Art Walk Projects' LandMark residencies. These centred on the role of place and the shaping of community, and considered local sites of value, in particular relating to themes of working land and industrial pasts.

The distinctive bottle kilns in Portobello, Edinburgh, are now the only physical remnant of a once thriving ceramics industry. However, the voices of the women, who painted the distinctive thistle design on pots at the celebrated Buchan pottery, have remained largely unrecorded until now. This book focuses on five of Buchan’s former decorators, through their own words, personal photographs and other memorabilia.

Spanning 1953 to 1972, before the pottery relocated to Crieff, the interviews are unique contributions in which photographs show the Decorators at work and at play as well as evidence the dramatic changes to the area where they once worked. The book makes visible a hidden social history of women that is still within living memory, where themes of life-long friendships, working responsibilities and conditions, are remembered alongside vivid memories of their craft.

The Decorators of Portobello: In their own words aims to draw attention to a group of women’s working lives at a point in time when there is an increased sense of the important of place and industrial heritage to Western Portobello.

Two editions of 100
61 illustrations, 52 full colour, 9 B&W
300mm x 220mm (landscape)

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