Gallery of Wonder Exhibition at the Great North Museum: Hancock

The Heart of Jack Crawford: A Shrine to Unsung Heroes, my solo exhibition of recent ceramic pieces, will open on Saturday 14th May PM in the Gallery of Wonder cabinet at the Great North Museum: Hancock. The venue is also taking part in The Late Shows. The show ends on 10th June.

Click here to see brochure.

Living Fossils: Art as archaeology, archaeology as art.

My work concerns the convergence of art and archaeology and often results in the creation of ‘living fossils’, or ‘fossils of life’, in which experiences, journeys and memories are preserved and monumentalised, in material form. This cabinet installation investigates, through porcelain, the idea of inventing a fictive material culture of relics from an imagined or lost civilisation. Incorporating imagery and text yielded through my research on Sunderland pottery, further inspiration has come from my own childhood collection of toys, Eskimo ivory carving, scrimshaw and other folk art.

Much cultural information, once recorded in material form, is now often stored or expressed electronically, leading to the “dematerialisation of the material world” (Renfrew 2003, p.181) and the possibility that many of the symbolic elements of our culture might become lost in the future. The aim of my doctoral project is to explore how the enduring nature of ceramic can be applied to this issue in order to form a means of enduring “external symbolic storage” (ibid., p.188). If, as Gell (1998, p. 222 cited in Layton 2005, pp. 29-46) argued, our consciousness is materialised in the objects we leave behind, a museum collection can be seen as a library of our ancestors’ thoughts, hopes and preoccupations. By responding to a collection, an artist can simultaneously reference the past and create new material traces. Not only does this augment the collection, but, by having the power to “fascinate, compel, and […] delight the spectator” (Gell 1998, p. 23), these artefacts also have the potential to act as a store of the creator’s agency into the future. 

Gell, A. 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Clarendon Press.

Layton, R. 2005, Structure and Agency in Art in B. Derlon Lavollée, M. Coquet and M. Jeudy-Ballini (eds.) 2005,

Les cultures à l’œuvre: rencontres en art. Paris: Adam Biro, pp. 29-46.

Renfrew, C. 2003, Figuring it Out: Figuring it Out: What are We? Where Do We Come From? The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, Thames and Hudson.