This exhibition showcases new creative approaches for exploring the diverse and eclectic ceramics collection held by GSA Archives and Collections. Produced through poetry and studio workshops, these new works re-interpret the physical properties, forms, and holistic characteristics of the school’s historic artefacts.

Beginning with a poetry workshop in the archive, 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 their reflections of their sensory encounters into poems.

Participants then worked in studio, re-interpreting the poems into objects, borrowing from the deceptively simple process of Barvas-ware, a pottery technique developed on the Hebridean Island of Lewis between the 1860s and 1930s, in which pieces are simply built by hand with terracotta clay and hot milk-glaze. Tooled with a set of modular shapes and abstracted text, each participant devised a new object and poem, then came together to make and fire the work seen in the exhibition.

The new work, though borrowing from the original, is separated by form, language, time, place, and the unique perspectives of its makers. Like the historic makers of Barvas-ware, these new forms reference and iterate upon existing ceramic objects. They speak to Scottish vernacular traditions and the Glasgow School of Art’s changing styles. By adopting basic, lo-fi historic techniques in the present, there is an increased consciousness of the materials and processes used to manifest creativity.

1. Candle Holder Ann Macbeth (1875-1948)
New Interpretation by Cat Tams
Cat graduated from GSA with a BA (Hons) Painting & Printmaking in 2023 and continues to live and practice in Glasgow. With a rigour of observational drawing at the core of her pictures, she often uses familiar landscapes and objects as a starting point. Her work responds to connecting and contrasting visible relationships, exploring light and colour, surface and texture, and form and volume. The resulting interactions bring to life the seemingly inanimate subject of still life. With a background in geography and teaching, and time spent living and travelling in other parts of the world, her work is also a store of time, place and memory – drawing from her experience and relationship with places and objects.

2. Square Bottle Baajie Pickard (1918-2009)
New Interpretation by Fionn Duffy
Fionn is an artist from Glasgow. She uses objects, video and text to weave spiralling narratives that converge in porous zones of contact between bodies, focussing on historically neglected practices of creation and disposal, to traverse the distance between material excavation and current systems of production and distribution. Recent solo exhibitions include “引き継ぐ : nets, eddies and cadences of habit”, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Japan and “this smooth weight holds and gluts / tha an cudthrom caoin-sa a glèihadh ‘sa slugadh” An Lanntair, Scotland, where she drew from research into early uses of clay and milk, inspired by the female potters of Barvas to focus on the pleasure and play involved in extrapolating a romanticised past to resist categorisation.

3. Small Vase (with green swirls) Robert Sinclair Thomson
New Interpretation by Katy West
Katy's research focuses on craft and design through curatorial practice. Current projects circumnavigate the complexities of disparate ceramic collections to explore ways to animate their display and invigorate audience engagement. Katy is Cross School’s Academic Coordinator at GSA and focuses on interdisciplinary and collaborative courses. Concurrent to her teaching and curatorial practice she has specialist studio expertise as a designer working in collaboration with production facilities to produce work that references folk craft and industrial ceramic histories.

4. Lugged Pot Judith Gilmour (1937-2003)
New Interpretation by Maria Howard
Maria is a writer and artist based in Glasgow. Working primarily with text and sculpture, her practice is concerned with the poetic and political connections between memory and imagination, site and material, colonialism and climate. She is currently a part-time PhD candidate at Glasgow School of Art – her research thinks with clay as a descendant of stone and as a potential disruptor of narratives of power and permanence. Maria is also a co-editor of Nothing Personal magazine and works as a freelance editor, translator and ceramics tutor.

5. Ceramic Pot John Calderwood (c. 1990s)
New Interpretation by Saijun (Xana) Huang
Saijun completed her undergraduate and master's studies in China, where she focused on a ceramic practice. Experimenting with mixing clay and composite materials. Her ceramic artworks are often inspired by images and symbols from Chinese Buddhist culture. Her current research direction involves applying and innovating with traditional ceramics and cultural symbols in contemporary ceramic art. Saijun's participation in this project seeks to explore a new model for the modern interpretation of traditional ceramic wares. The creation of textual poetry and structural reorganisation has opened-up possibilities and introduced interesting, innovative methods for her to explore ‘double presence’ in contemporary abstract vessels.

6. Ceramic Vase 18th century to 20th century
New Interpretation by Stella Hook
Stella studied history and politics as an undergraduate and completed her master’s at the University of St Andrews in Museum and Gallery Studies in 2013. Since 2010, she has worked in the museum sector focused around curatorial and collection-based activities at National Museums Scotland, National Trust for Scotland, Glasgow Life, Renfrewshire Leisure, and Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life. Currently, Stella works as GSA Archives & Collections Engagement Lead managing the use and promotion of the school’s heritage collections both within and beyond GSA.

7. Brown Vase (with black leaf detail) Unknown (c. 1990s)
New Interpretation by Noé Bick
Noé is an artist and writer working primarily on paper. They use screenplay and translucent, oil-soaked drawings and objects to explore the narratives surrounding legitimacy and failure in relation to reoccurring characters of the saint, the artist and the fish(erman). Noé currently studies at Glasgow School of Art.

8. Large Beige Vase Fergus Stewart (1998)
New Interpretation by Rhona Warwick Paterson
Rhona works across sculpture, poetry and performance. Her work offers feminist readings of the city particularly in the intuitive experiences of the built environment and how they are shaped and controlled and, in turn, how they shape us. Her recent research uses clay as a tool to explores the territory of risk and the place of migration between state and thought - a transitional space that uses making and process to explore heightened states of creativity. She is the Founder of First Hand Studio and is working with recent advances in the field of neuroscience to exploring methods of material handling in relation to clay’s capacity to elevate consciousness, neurogenesis and theta wave activity.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10108
• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10111
• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10110