Exhibition

The Past is Ever-Present

20 May – 24 May 2024

The Past is Ever-Present

[A Game of Exquisite Corpse]

 This exhibition showcases new creative approaches for exploring the diverse and eclectic ceramics collection held by GSA Archives and Collections. Produced through poetry and studio workshops, these new works re-interpret the physical properties, forms, and holistic characteristics of the School’s historic artefacts.

Beginning with a poetry workshop in the archive, participants were encouraged to have a multisensory experience of a selection of historic ceramics from the collection through sight, touch, and smell. Playing games using Surrealist creative writing techniques such as Consequences and Exquisite Corpse, they crafted their reflections of their sensory encounters into poems. 

Participants then worked in studio, re-interpreting the poems into objects, borrowing from the deceptively simple process of Barvas-ware, a pottery technique developed on the Hebridean Island of Lewis between the 1860s and 1930s, in which pieces are simply built by hand with terracotta clay and hot milk-glaze. Tooled with a set of modular shapes and abstracted text, each participant devised a new object and poem, then came together to make and fire the work.

The new work on display, though borrowing from the original, is separated by form, language, time, place, and the unique perspectives of its makers. Like the historic makers of Barvas-ware, these new forms reference and iterate upon existing ceramic objects. They speak to Scottish vernacular traditions and the Glasgow School of Art’s changing styles. Through their adoption of basic lo-fi techniques in the present, these works also demonstrate an increased consciousness of the materials and processes used to manifest creativity.

Project and exhibition curated by Katy West in collaboration with Stella Hook and GSA Archives & Collections.

Participants in the project:

Noé Bick

Fionn Duffy

Stella Hook

Maria Howard

Saijun Huang

Cat Tams

Rhona Warwick Paterson

Katy West

With thanks to GSA’s Archives & Collections, Independent Study Week & the Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

The exhibition preview is 17 May, 5pm-7pm.

The Past is Ever-Present opens to the public, 20-24 May from 10am-4pm at Window on Heritage exhibition space, Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art.

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