Centring and Clay Connections Exhibition

Centring and Clay Connections Exhibition        

Preview night on Thursday 25th September 3 - 6pm  

The exhibition runs until 10th October

Open on Thursdays 12 – 4, Fridays 12 – 4 & Saturdays 10 – 2

Please join us in Gallery North for the exhibition opening of two co-creative research projects ‘Centring’ and ‘Clay Connections’ on Thursday 25th September at 3pm – 6pm. Both projects are in collaboration with Beamish Museum’s Health and Wellbeing Team and Clay Connections is also in collaboration with Chilli Studios Mental Health Arts Charity. 

Centring is a longitudinal research project with the Beamish Health and Wellbeing Team through the creation of a pottery group in 2024 for people living with brain changes including dementia. Together we are exploring how craft can: nurture the learning of new skills and teaching these to others; foster meaningful connections and support individual’s wellbeing. We focus on ability, creativity and potential, supported by the framing of personhood. The term centring was chosen to reflect not only the process of centring clay on a wheel, but also the therapeutic practice of centring, a technique that can help people find balance and peace in their lives, which can be used in to help regulate stress, process trauma, and build meaningful relationships. Centring also signifies ways researchers can choose to involve people in their work, centring the person with lived experience, building the research relationship around them, and upholding their individual personhood. Beamish as a specific and rich environment of collective histories feeds into all of the heritage craft techniques we use and inspires much of what is made.  

Clay Connections project ran for twelve weeks in 2025, focused on reciprocal making between members of the Centring pottery group and potters at Chilli Studios (an arts charity in Newcastle delivering creative services to those who are, or are at risk of experiencing mental health problems, and those who experience other forms of social exclusion within their communities). Members of each group were paired and exchanged things about themselves with one another using design probes – which inspired each person in the making of a dinner setting for their project partner (a dinner plate, side plate, bowl and drinking vessel). At the end of the twelve weeks, they finally met in person to exchange the pottery made for each other and to share a meal together. 

Throughout the 12 weeks of the project, we saw the value in reciprocal gift-giving to an unknown other. The opportunities for speculation about the individual, the growing ‘relationship’ between two former strangers, the care taken in making the tableware and the growing sense of reassurance that the ‘other’ was also someone who might make mistakes but would still value care and effort in the making process. We found that the different groups could be introduced to each other at a distance and with limited self-disclosure in such a way as to create a strong sense of commitment, (and for some compassion and care) that infused any making or creative process and resulted in personal growth. A principal project value came from the way that participants turned their social gaze outwards rather than inwards and saw themselves as people who had the potential to hold others in their thoughts and to give them a sustained period of, albeit remote, care, manifested through the making process - and the agency to change the lives of others in some small way, but were also protected in the sense that a failed glaze or flaw in the making process became surmountable, when considered in terms of the larger context of reciprocal exchange and the overwhelming sense of connectedness that came from the project as a whole.