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An Incomplete Archive of Unfinished Ideas – Sculptural installation

This work was an installation created for the exhibition ‘Memoranda’, shown at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham in 2011.

Curators Tessa Peters and Janice West invited Potter and three other artists to consider and respond to the archive of the Crafts Study Centre at UCA Farnham. The works produced were shown together with a selection of archive objects as the exhibition ‘Memoranda’. An accompanying publication contained essays by Daniel Miller, Dr Glenn Adamson and the curators, as well as interviews with the participating artists (2011).

Potter’s ‘An Incomplete Archive of Unfinished Ideas’ was underpinned by collections research in the Craft Study Centre Archive. The final piece was informed by material Potter found there: a collection of ceramic test pieces produced by Lucie Rie and Edward Johnston’s instructional calligraphy (‘56 ‘A’s made as wrongly as possible’). In the ‘Memoranda’ interview, Potter discusses collections’ social role as classificatory mechanisms and their inherent capacity to divide completed objects from the processes of their making.

Potter’s response highlights ‘elimination’ and ‘incompletion’ as intrinsic to making practice. Twenty-five containers for rejected experiments were carefully constructed and labelled; these invited viewers to consider craft as a form of memory and notation, rather than purely the skilful construction of objects. Potter offers an encounter with the truth of error, and underlines the role of process as a journey towards knowing. The work questions contemporary craft culture, which validates the artefact through the critics who endow it with ‘cultural capital’.

‘Memoranda’ was reviewed in Crafts (2011), an magazine (2011) and Museums Journal (2011) amongst others. A seminar was held during the exhibition, where Potter discussed working with the archive and the development of her response.