Vessel, perhaps

Installation at the Millgate Museum 2006

There is a useful taxanomic list that an English museum
made of its collections. I love lists, as they are often full of unexpected poetic
moments. This list towards its conclusion contained this :

toy (13)
transferred (6)
unknown (227)
utensil (46)
vessel (5090)
vessel, perhaps (1)

It is a moment caught between pathos (the curator struggling to define an object) and insight (how can we list the objects in our lives?). It brings up the question of what objects we have in our lives, and what objects are deemed worthy of museums. Listening to stories of how collections came into being is a very good way of thinking through the levels of meaning that they embody. The narratives of collecting (who collected, why did they collect, what is missing from the collection) are often effaced by museums. The labels, acquisition numbers, contexts in which they are shown, inhibition about touch are all signals of removal from the narratives of our own lives.

The dramatic recent changes in how the Newark Museum and the Millgate Museum are organised allows for an exciting intervention that could bring these questions –and narratives- to life. Given the huge diversity of the collections (industrial archaeology, agricultural history, social history, material culture, typographical materials, art) the objective of this intervention was to give the visitor an alternative route around the museum, one that brings these questions alive to both those visitors who may be habituated to the collections, and to new audiences.

As a potter I wanted to signpost the diversity of ceramic artefacts in the collection. So ceramic is pottery of course, but also the tiles around a Victorian fireplace and a Roman rooftile, the tessellations from a Roman pavement or Edwardian loo. But rather than thinking of it as a roadmap through the material, the installation questioned both materiality itself and the ways in which the dynamic of museums work. Above all it was an opportunity to spend time thinking about the contingency of objects.