Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
'Made In China'
'Made In China' is a large-scale sculpture addressing distributed authorship in the contemporary crafts context. The work was commissioned for the exhibition 'Thing Tang Trash', curated by Jorunn Veiterberg at the Museum of Decorative Arts, Norway. The work comprises 80 porcelain vases, each 1.5 metres tall, produced in Jingdezhen. The vases were imported by Twomey to Norway and installed across the ground floor gallery. The installation of the vases greeted the visitor and led them to the main exhibition space. The installation offered the visitor the opportunity to walk through, round, and into the work. 'Made In China' was selected for the British Ceramics Biennial 2013.
Please see portfolio for fuller documentation of research dimensions.
Recent years have seen the emergence or use of ceramics material to explore increasingly conceptual concerns that include such diverse issues as rapid modernisation (in the case of Ai Weiwei’s on-going series of ceramic works that ironically reinterpret historic Chinese artefacts), or the environment (as represented by Mineo Mizuna). Other artists such as Keith Harrison, Linda Florence and Phoebe Cummings have used teams of collaborators, but their importance is not considered authorial in a shared or intrinsic sense. Twomey’s research examines ceramic-making through a lens of distributed authorship: not as a means of making but as a reason for making. She also asks how ceramics can confront issues concerned with globalisation and the ways and forms within which its artefacts come into being through distributed, social and commissioning networks. Research for 'Made in China' was originally developed in the context of an 'artist in residency' scheme at the V&A ceramics gallery in 2011. Over a period of seven months, Twomey explored the V&A’s ceramic collection and, inspired by a 13th century tea bowl from Jingdezhden, investigated questions of migrating craft skills and the persistence of skill in ceramics manufacturing. 'Made in China' demonstrates how ceramic practices can engage with the topic of globalisation by engendering, organising and nurturing distributed, creative, collaborative and material processes. In addition, the project aligns itself with conceptual traditions from the visual arts by highlighting the function of the processes that bring manufactured ceramic objects into being (i.e. as a set of instructions, commissioning processes and distributed conversations).
