Cultural Icons: remaking a popular pottery tradition (2019–20).
This curatorial output is an exhibition and participatory project that sought to reframe two museum collections of Victorian flatbacks in relation to contemporary social contexts. The project was developed for the British Ceramics Biennale at Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, and Hove Museum & Art Gallery. Peters commissioned six figurative artists to create flatbacks representing contemporary ideas and events. Community groups, based in the Staffordshire Potteries, worked collaboratively to make editions based on the artists’ designs, employing traditional flatback-making processes. In both iterations of the exhibition, the contemporary artists’ flatbacks were displayed alongside selected historical examples. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qqvvq
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, September 14 – November 17, 2019; Hove Museum & Art Gallery, November 28, 2019 – March 1, 2020. Further details in portfolio.
- Brief description of type
- Other: Curation
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The project investigates: how exhibitions of contemporary ceramics can assist public understanding of historic ceramic artefacts; how participatory projects can assist people to attain a greater appreciation of ceramic heritage and ceramic skills; what constitutes a good model of participatory practice in ceramics and how such a model can encourage historical insight and cultural understanding.
By juxtaposing a display of Victorian flatbacks with six contemporary artists’ responses to them, the exhibitions set up a dialogue of discovery between the viewer and both historic and contemporary artefacts. A contemporary artefact can prompt a recognition of the purpose of the historic one, while viewers’ response to the historic one may allow better understanding of the contemporary. In the search for a good model of participatory practice, Peters’s research indicates that a significant value of participation resides in the potential of a project to achieve its own momentum, where participants know they are trusted and have agency to create and contribute something unforeseen to the mix. Rather than a separate strand of activity centred largely on making, the participatory element of Cultural Icons inspired insights into the production of Victorian folk art and the parallels it might have today.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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