Output details

Disjecta Fragmen Communitis.

Research project by Professor Robert Williams with Jack Aylward-Williams, supported by wider (international)contributions and resulting in exhibition of a mixed media installation.

A collecting and archival art-work that resulted in an installation of comparative collections of vitreous material, installed within a series of vitrines for exhibition at a national museum of glass manufacturing. The work considered aspects of the quotidian, place and interpretation.

Amongst the most ubiquitous of materials encountered day-to-day are shards of broken glass. This material occurs almost anywhere, yet is ignored because of this ubiquity and because it represents the broken, incomplete, or abject. By implication, glass fragments also signal the complexity of cultures, industrial sophistication, histories, and biological needs. Amassing quantities of material from a range of contexts; a Victorian dump, beaches, archaeological sites. Robert and Jack focused on the construction of taxonomic groupings of the shard collections into different categories, types and forms. It became apparent that this material is open to much by way of mediation, interpretation and exploration.

Emergent research interests were to explore considerations of cultural significances mediated by the material by inviting an international group of artists and archaeologists to collect shards. Collaborators were invited to make field trips, to gather material and to generate documentary materials to contextualize their collections in terms of veracity of location, method of collection and the identification of significances.

Collecting contexts became global. For example, artists like Mark Dion collected from New Bedford, the whaling town made famous in Moby Dick; Mark Grote from New Orleans referenced Hurricane Katrina; Kathy Toth used her collection from Israel to reflect upon the geopolitics of the Golan Heights; Inken Hemsen considered history and place on the Baltic coast; archaeologist Cornelius Holtorff explored decommissioned riverside industrial sites at Kattrumpen, Sweden, and Bryan Wilson sent Trinitite, radioactive glass formed in the first atomic explosion at New Mexico. Each contribution was presented according to the instructions of the collector/s.