Slow Boat continues its journey

This Spring, Ikon Slow Boat is programmed and produced in collaboration with GRAIN Projects.

Over the last few weeks, we have continued journeying north on the canal, through Stoke-on-Trent, delivering artist-led workshops with groups from the city.

The artists have responded to the unique arts and crafts, heritage and environment of Stoke-on-Trent. The canal winds its way through the six towns that make up the city, which celebrates its centenary this year, providing green space and a unique insight into local communities and the industrial heritage.

On Saturday 10 May, artist and educator Anna Francis, Co-founder and Director of Portland Inn Project, launched A Canalside Arcana on the beautiful Etruria Canal. This new public art trail, created by Francis, features ceramic plaques and illustrated cards full of folklore and facts about nature. The project is commissioned by Appetite, North Staffordshire’s Creative People & Places project, with the Canal & River Trust. Francis led workshops on Slow Boat and provided us with a taster of Arcana, joining us at Etruria and Middleport Pottery for journeys along the canal.

Anthony Hammond, another Stoke-on-Trent based artist, has also led workshops on Slow Boat, focusing on the heritage of willow, a material that ran alongside the pottery industry, supporting the growth of the ceramic factories, and grown in large swathes alongside the canals. Willow was grown and used to make baskets to carry ceramics along the canals to the port of Liverpool and beyond, providing a safe structure for transportation. Participants on Slow Boat made willow sculptures with Hammond and heard about this unique material and its use.

Becky Nunes invited participants, including YMCA and Middleport families, to look again at nature found along the canal. Her In Your Place mobile phone photography workshops focused on close looking, colour and textures in nature. Ruby Nixon led cyanotype workshops with Portland Inn Project and Stephen Burke led lumen print workshops with groups including Pinc College onboard Slow Boat which has provided a stunning, and sunshine filled, floating workshop space and gallery.

Over the last few weeks we have moored at the beautiful Middleport Pottery, supported by Re-Form, and enjoyed the surroundings of a heritage site, working factory, artists’ studios and arts and education spaces, including Pinc College campus. We were joined by participants from Pinc College, who made images, foraged the Canalside towpaths and created willow sculptures with us. Pinc College were so creative in their workshops; a college that offers inspiring education and pathways into employment for neurodivergent young people.

Slow Boat moves further north to Westport Lake next week, in Burslem. It is often referred to as the ‘mother town’ of Stoke-on-Trent. By 1777, the Trent & Mersey Canal was nearing completion here and the town boomed on the back of fine pottery production. Many of the nineteenth-century buildings remain, including the important Burslem School of Art. In the 1970s, with the onset of polytechnic education, the School of Art closed, but its legacy remains with important alumni including the artist and playwright Arthur Berry, artist and printmaker Doris Boulton-Maude, artists William Bowyer and Richard Arthur Ledward and the pioneering women ceramic designers and potters Clarice Cliff and Susie Cooper.

Slow Boat is supported by Freelands Foundation, read more about the project here.