I exhibited work from the George Brown Series as part of Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition, an interdisciplinary conference held at the Centre for Research
in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 18-20 June
2015. My display in the Alison Richards Building will continue until September.
The George Brown Series is a group of ceramic vessels made
in response to the George Brown Collection which I researched as part of an
AHRC international placement at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in
Osaka, Japan. George Brown accumulated
over 3000 ethnographic specimens while serving as a missionary in Oceania
between 1860 and 1907. Described as ‘one of the most mobile collections in the
world’, it has had a number of homes over the years, exercising the endeavours
of a variety of people.
The George Brown
Series was inspired by my research at the NME which focused on
‘transitional’ artefacts, in which influences from both the originating
community and the European colonisers were manifest. A series of bamboo tubes
from the Solomon Islands scrimshawed with scenes of European and indigenous
encounters were of particular interest as they reminded me of some of the
maritime imagery I was familiar with from my work on nineteenth century
Sunderland pottery. These items spoke of the ‘creolization and hybridity’
characteristic of the colonial experience.
My porcelain vessels collage a range of visual and
contextual information in order to communicate something of the collection’s
complex history. Dutch traders took Sunderland pottery to Japan and it is not
inconceivable that some pieces might have made it to Oceania. The George Brown Series exploits this
conceit, imagining what a fusion of Solomon Island lime containers and
Sunderland pottery might look like filtered through twenty-first century Japan.
Read more about the George Brown Collection here.
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| A selection of porcelain vessels from the George Brown Collection (2013-15). |
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| A detail of my display at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge. |
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| Instagram image of my installation at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge. |
