For artists Louise Nolan and Ruth Impey, the £14 million bridge at Stockingfield Art Park is more than a connection between two communities in the north of Glasgow. It’s a metaphor for what gets them out of bed in the morning.

“What we are doing here is based on the idea of connecting and building relationships,” said Impey, one half of the duo’s Make It Glasgow community interest company (CIC). “Relationships between communities, relationships between people and creativity, and relationships between the past and the present. And it’s also about us coming together.”

Nolan and Impey are the creative forces behind the social enterprise, whose aim is not only to mark and remember one of the city’s most thriving Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century industries, but to do their bit to revive it. The pair have amalgamated their ethos of community art practice and ceramic specialism to establish the CIC, one of the ultimate ambitions for which is to revive ceramic manufacturing and trade in the city, once a global leader in the pottery industry, as well as burnishing a bricks and mortar Scottish Pottery Museum.

Working from a hub in Stockingfield Bridge Art Park, the most recent and visible sign of their progress since coming together in 2022 is the enormous Bella The Beithir, a 125-metre concrete serpent designed by artist Nichol Wheatley. It was unveiled in March, with a call-out to the public to come along and design ceramic scales to be placed along the beast’s vast hide. 
Nolan, who has an MPhil in Art and Design, comes from a background in visual arts in youth settings. She said: “Setting up a community interest company came from a realisation that it would be very difficult without having an organisation to back the work we were doing in one way or another. 

“I always knew getting government grants or even charitable grants wasn’t a sustainable way to do things. We wanted to make things, design things, use our skills. I always thought there was a way to do all these things – make stuff for profit, but to invest it back into the community and train people. That was my objective for the work I was doing.” It was while working on an installation in the park called Many Hands Mosaic in 2022, that Nolan and Impey cast their ambitions.

Impey, who has degrees in History and Museum Studies from Edinburgh and Leicester Universities, said: “I had brought together a group of like-minded people and started thinking about how we could push towards a Scottish Pottery Museum, the idea being to build relationships around Scotland’s clay heritage, local, national and international. 
“Then Lou invited me to work with her on the Many Hands Mosaic project. Make It Glasgow was formed out of those two idea streams coming together.  Lou has drawn on the history and heritage of Glasgow ceramics through her practice and I’ve been researching and working on the Nineteenth-Century ceramic trade routes for a long time. 

The Herald:

“In 250 years of manufacturing in Scotland, there were 15 potteries trading across the globe from Glasgow. It was an extraordinary global trade, the history and the heritage touches every continent. My practice is based on teaching and understanding through clay, but also how we can develop those ideas now. We hadn’t known each other very long. But we decided to go for it.”
A successful application to First Port’s Build It fund secured a £25,000 grant in 2023, enabling them to buy equipment. Two kilns were donated by Lambhill Stables and another community project. 

The fire was lit. Impey said: “Redeveloping products on the side of the canal from ceramics was one of the key themes of our business plan and First Port were keen to support us. 
“We have a sustainable model. The products we’ll make and sell will help sustain the business but we’re also able to bring assets into the community through the work that 
we do. Any profit that’s made goes back in.”

After decades of transient community arts work, it represented an opportunity for Nolan to do something more permanent in the neighbourhood she calls home, made possible by Scottish Canals’ bridge investment which connected the old waterway communities of Ruchill, Maryhill and Gilshochill for the first time in 232 years. “That bridge is slap-bang in the middle of this community,” she said. “When Scottish Canals put a call out to community groups saying they wanted public art commissions, I thought: ‘We’ll be having that!’”

Small-scale manufacturing on the site has already started. Last year, they teamed up with City of Glasgow College to make Smogware, a tea set using reclaimed Glaswegian Victorian moulds, with glaze trapping particulate scraped by Impey and students from pollution on the underside of the city’s motorways. Next month they’ll bring their first product line to market.
Impey said: “We have a lovely red clay seam running through this site, but we’re looking to develop products from local sustainable material sources. When you develop glazes and clays you need to use metal oxides, and mining for those is bad for the environment, so we’ll be looking at waste products produced in the city. 

“We’d like to get to using metals discarded from old phones and TVs,  rather than mining for resources. We’d eventually like to be looking at renewables to fire our kilns.”
A commission to create benches at Falkirk Wheel is currently in production and there are ambitions to tap into the whisky market. “Scotland used pottery for whisky in the past and it would be nice to have those created again in Scotland,” said Impey. “We know people like authentic crafts.
“We want to bring ceramic production skills back and to ignite other people’s ideas and imaginations through clay.”

For Nolan, Make It Glasgow is a seam that runs back to her childhood.
“I grew up in Bo’ness,” she said. “It was full of potteries. You wouldn’t know it now unless you walk along the shore and pick bits of ceramic up and go ‘what is that?’ 
“I was 14 looking at these things, then found myself at Glasgow School of Art studying ceramics, trying to find a sense of belonging and connection with my practice. 
“If we were somewhere like Stoke on Trent we’d be able to find an old pottery building. But in Glasgow, we eradicated our design history.
“So many working class areas in the Central Belt were connected through making and design. We want to connect people to a post-industrial sense of self-esteem.” 
 

makeitglasgow.com