New Making: Cultures of Quotidian Pottery and Porcelain Mending in the Long Eighteenth Century

My doctoral project will explore lower-status household pottery and porcelain mending in Britain between 1660 and 1830,
championing these repair cultures as an important and under-studied facet of consumption in the long eighteenth
century. The diverse practices of china-burning, metal-lacing, gluing, riveting, filling and wire-binding are often passed
over by scholars and concealed by museological practice. Informed by new materialist and actor-network-theoretic
perspectives, I will provide an innovative new study exploring ceramic repair as a 'remaking' where the agencies of
trades people, servants, ceramicists, householders, diners, cooks and materials intermixed. Research will combine
traditional archive and collections based methodologies with parallel experimental reconstructive approaches to draw
visual and textual material from MS receipt books, advertisements, trade cards, household accounts and probate
inventories together with the rich landscape of ceramic collections and archeological assemblages which surround
Cambridge. I will take my material sources predominantly from the Fitzwilliam Museum's unique Glaisher ceramics,
collaborating with the Museum under the co-supervision of Keeper of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Dr
Victoria Avery to integrate this often ignored and erased history into our broader understanding of eighteenth-century
consumption.