These figures come from a time when recipes for porcelain paste were extremely valuable closely guarded secrets, and reputations were built on the fine detail and delicacy of the porcelain . The challenge or the proof of the craftsmen’s skill and the quality of the porcelain, was to produce figures with the most daringly fragile extremities; standing on one leg or holding an arm in the air.

In less fine examples, tricks were used to give the appearance of skill. These people ended up with young girls with improbable tree stumps sprouting from their elbows and strange organic lumps rising up behind shepherds to support their flutes. I am interested in the supports we use in life, to justify ourselves or to give us courage or to enable us to enjoy ourselves. It appeals to me to be able to portray figures whose supports are so glaringly obvious. It is important to me that all

my little people are having a good time, they carry the fact that they have no choice but to display their inability to stand up unaided with good humour. I also like the fact that the figures are usually dressed in their best clothes, with all their face on – and yet when this painted on self hits the kiln it melts and slips slightly

Drawing has always been part of my studio practice. The project 21g was an attempt to explore that specifically but drawing runs through the way that I work and think.

It’s difficult to sidestep the obvious when making work about motherhood. The starting point for the work was the effect living with a baby has on your cognition: the way that you think and process information. The fierceness of the love can be like trying to think standing next to a waterfall. Sleep deprivation is a tried and tested form of torture. The interruptions and lack of solitude can confuse your sense of self. I am affecting my daughter’s drawings and she is affecting mine. When Sadie was a baby, my input was stylised and made in a removed way, as if I needed to overstate my ‘qualified artist’ status in the face of my apparent zombification. Her marks were immediate and confused. I worked with her marks to complement them. She destroyed my marks and ignored them.  Now she is older she is very aware of not wanting to make a mistake or ‘ruin’ things but can still relax and enjoy extended invented narratives with accompanying drawings as an extension of the story telling.

“So, if not pious, not earnest, not pompous, and not authoritative – what then could seriousness be and where might it be practised? And is seriousness in the art world a doomed project? Could it be revived strategically as a tool by which to insist on some things without involving the reams of critical analysis that expose, unveil, blame, and reveal power relations, end ensure that we know in a socially responsible way what’s what? Most importantly, how can seriousness function as a rupture and as the vehicle for intellectual intensity – as a shared entity rather than as an isolating pensiveness”

Irit Rogoff in Visual Culture as Seriousness 2013

Between October 2013 and May 2014 artist Emma Drye worked as artist in residence at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre: home to 120 curatorial, conservation, management, technical, access and outreach, front of house, administrative and collections management staff.

“I began with an interest in the relationship between my studio practice which had been largely painting, and the odd interventions in the world outside that I was increasingly drawn to make. The relative value of the two outputs has switched. I now almost exclusively operate in a situated practice; designing creatively generative transactions in non art settings.

This residency used a negotiated methodology to create shared spaces for thinking – exploring the potential and limitations of significance. I have developed what I have termed a negotiated practice. As artist in residence at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre I have responded to encounters with staff, particularly through conversation. Mapping roles and responsibilities has become a focus – who does what in a situated or participatory practice?

Like the multiple tunings of a pre digital radio, I have opened up the potential registers of process to create a more encompassing and thereby more sustainable practice. I have developed a certain shameless élan and have a rather liberating sense of having breached the defences of something.”

Emma Drye

The residency used conversations with staff to develop art interventions which coalesced into a series of alternative manifestos for the workplace – highlighting the wonderful and multi directional contributions made by staff to the sense of place, the intellectual life and wider human experience of the organisation.