Blue and white oval platter depicting the sinking of a boat carrying refugees off the coast of Libya in 2016. Artist Paul Scott created this plate by transfer-printing the image onto a nineteenth-century shell-edge pearlware platter before re-glazing and re-firing it.

The design is adapted from a photograph taken by the Italian Navy, which was widely circulated in the media after the event. In May 2016, an overcrowded fishing vessel carrying 562 men, women and children was identified as being in difficulties by the Navy and a search and rescue operation launched. As the patrol team approached, the passengers on the fishing vessel moved across the deck to access the life jackets being given out, causing it to capsize. The image shows people climbing on top of the overturning hull. Others are jumping into the water and attempting to swim to the nearby rescue vessels. Five people lost their lives in the disaster. In the same week, an estimated 700 people drowned while attempting to journey across the Mediterranean and the photograph of the capsizing boat became a touchstone for coverage of the crisis.

In reproducing this widely circulated image on a blue-and-white ceramic plate, Scott draws a parallel between the growing connectedness of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries and the contentious, arduous and dangerous journeys made by migrants today. On trading ships, ceramics were often stored in the lower parts of the ships, both to provide ballast and because they were impervious to water. Conversely, human lives are shown on this plate to be fragile in the context of warfare and migrant sea crossings.

The 1820s platter used in creating ‘Refugee Series No.7’ is an example of shell-egded pearlware. This glazed earthenware produced in Staffordshire from the 1770s is characterized by its hardiness and its white glaze. The moulding around the edge of pearlware dishes was often picked out with a line of colour, a design feature reproduced by Scott in his design.

The printed design of ‘Refugee Series No.7’ mimics blue and white transferware. Developed at the same time as pearlware, transfer-printing enabled potteries to print, rather than paint, images and patterns onto ceramics before firing. Not only did this mean that patterned ceramics could be produced in larger numbers at less cost, such underglaze designs made the ceramics usable day-to-day. Both shell-edged pearlwares and blue and white transferwares were mass-produced, and their relative cheapness meant they were accessible to almost all consumers and used around every table. The comfortable domesticity evoked by blue and white tableware offers a jarring contrast with this image of people who have been forced to leave their homes and risk their lives to reach safety.

The connections made in this plate between ceramics, geo-politics and transoceanic movement are also rooted in the history of ceramics. While they had appeared in Europe in very small numbers over the preceding centuries, Chinese ceramics gained prominence in international trade in the 16th century as European companies established global shipping routes and began commercial trade with Asia. Chinese porcelain was imported along with cargoes of tea, silks, paintings, lacquerware, metalwork, and ivory and became a desirable, luxurious and exotic commodity. These trades were fraught with inequality and violence; wars were fought to ensure the continuity and profitability of the movement of these commercial goods.

British and European potters strove to emulate Chinese and continental ceramics, both in attempting to manufacture a ceramic as fine and durable as porcelain, but also in copying their blue and white designs. Once achieved, British pearlwares and blue and white transferwares were bought by British consumers and exported across the world throughout the nineteenth century.

The designs on nineteenth-century blue and white transferware were often also global in outlook. Not only did they copy Chinese designs, they were printed with illustrations of the people, landscapes and wildlife of foreign places and British colonies. In doing so, they became one of the ways that the British public formed an image of places like China, India and the Arctic. Scott alludes to this use of print media on blue and white ceramics in creating understandings of the world. However, instead of romanticized depictions of imperial landscapes, he presents the harrowing reality of the global refugee crisis.

Paul Scott is contemporary artist who works in the medium of ceramics. He collects and repurposes historic ceramics, overlaying his own designs created through collaging printed sources. He uses the familiar visual language of blue and white transferware to comment on modern political and social issues around war, migration, energy and the environment. His practice draws on his extensive knowledge of the history and technicalities of transferware. His work has been exhibited internationally and is is held in many museum collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, National Museums Liverpool, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn Art Museum.