Output details

Order and disorder: Some relationships between ceramics, sculpture and museum taxonomies

This conference presentation and article summarises one element of a complete review of the ways that ceramics collections at National Museum wales were planned between 2004 and 2011. One dimension of Tooby’s interest in collaboration and interpretation of collections has been a programme of artists’ interventions in ceramics collections. This has involved both Amgueddfa Cymru locations and partner collaborators in other venues. This programme was also the vehicle for a conference co-organised with University of Glamorgan, entitled ‘The Go-Between’.

Tooby developed new research into the mechanisms for artists and makers to access different collections resources. He also collaborated with them on modes of presentation and dissemination. Examples of such methodologies include research into using historically specific collections records as a comparator with current collections records as a pedagogic tool; and using technologies of display to generate new display forms, such as historically specific display systems juxtaposed with contemporary forms of display as part of the iconography of display.

Additionally, his earlier work on Tate St Ives, and a recent response to that venue, is the subject of a further article: When forms become attitude: A consideration of the adoption by an artist of ceramic display as narrative device and symbolic landscape for the online research website ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Ceramics in the expanded field.

ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com/essays – sourced February 14 2013. www.interpretingceramics.com/issue014/articles/04.htm