Output details

'Forever'

'Forever' was made as a response to the historic Burnap Collection at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas, USA. The work consisted of 1,345 ceramic cups whose design was derived from an original ceramic found in the Burnap’s British Ceramics collection. The project invited audience participation by enabling exhibition visitors to choose one of the cups to keep forever. In so doing, they were obliged to sign a legally binding agreement of care for the selected cup, which was labelled with the new owner’s name for the show’s duration. Over the exhibition period, the public gradually took ownership of every cup in the installation. The 1,345 cups were collected by the new owners at the close of the exhibition (please see film on CD).

Please see portfolio for fuller documentation of research dimensions.

The use of contemporary ceramics as an interventionist medium in the reinterpretation of museum collections is now a well-established trope. De Waal in 2007 (Arcanum, Museum of Wales) focussed on the role of the ceramic artist as an interface with educational teams within the museum and beyond, and recent work by Christie Brown at the Freud Museum has sought poetic reinterpretations of Freud’s collection of artefacts. This project differs from these approaches by asking how audience relationships to ceramic objects might be recast to create lasting audience relations to the ceramic object, the museum and by extension to the artist. The project reconceptualises the relationship between the audience and the museum-sited ceramic artefact, producing new ways for ceramics practitioners to engage with institutions and audiences. 'Forever' relocates the role of the audience, from viewer to carer and from viewer to owner. In doing so, innovative methods for audience engagement are produced that relocate quasi-legal institutional processes geared towards donors, through application to modern ceramic practices. The relationships established through this process bind artist, audience and artwork together over extended periods, long beyond the end point of the physical exhibition. Thus 'Forever' plays with questions of time, reinterpreting and questioning how normative processes of ceramic exhibition fix these relations within institutional contexts. A number of site visits over a three-year period developed initial research, involving extended discussions with the museum curator. Technical drawings, photography and sketches were used to produce designs for the cup, and the furniture used for the installation. All 1,345 'Forever' cups were commissioned by the artist and made in the UK by a historic ceramics producer from a design derived from the original collection of British ceramics in the Burnap Collection at the Nelson Atkins Museum.