Sometimes if you look at something intently and look away there is an after-image left behind. A profile or a fragment of pattern can feel as if it is burning on your retina. The old Ceramics Galleries that stretched along the top floor of the V&A have gone. But there is an after-image.
This installation, commissioned in 2009 to celebrate the opening of the new ceramics galleries, was made from my memories of the old rooms where I spent many days of my childhood. A mass of porcelain held in space; 425 vessels have been placed on a red metal shelf that floats high up in the dome. It reflects on early Chinese celadons, eighteenth-century European porcelain and early twentieth-century modernism.
Stand in the mosaic circle in the V&A's entrance hall and look up through the square aperture in the ceiling above: there you will glimpse an arc of the red steel ring.
