This case study will present a recent collaborative project that took place at Glasgow School of Art’s Archives and Collections. The project integrated novel uses of concrete poetry and surrealist games with text to explore historic ceramic artefacts and inspire the production of new work in clay through the creation of pastiche Barvasware.

This approach sought to dispel the sometimes reverent and hushed tone found in museum stores, and to adopt a more intuitive and sensory approach to considering and recording objects to inform new designs. 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 reflections of their encounters into poems.

Tooled with a set of abstracted texts, participants devised new poems, which were re-interpreted into objects. They borrowed from the deceptively simple process of Barvas-ware, a pottery technique developed on Lewis (1860-1930) in which pieces are simply built by hand with locally dug clay and glazed with hot milk-glaze. Like historic Barvas-ware artefacts, these new forms reference and iterate upon existing ceramic objects.

The new objects and texts created where brought together in an exhibition alongside the works that inspired them. Though, borrowing from the original, the new objects were separated by form, language, time, place, and the unique perspectives of their makers.

The project’s aim was to use curatorial strategies to explore creative approaches to engage participants and audiences with the diverse and eclectic ceramics held within the collections. The relationship between art and the written word was central to this process. This paper will present an illustrated account of the project and reflect upon the effectiveness and usefulness of this approach in both a curatorial and creative context.