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.

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