Day Symposium: INTERPRETING COLLECTIONS: IDEA, OBJECT, SITE

About

This one-day symposium, timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown, will consider the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium will address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud's archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. Speakers include; Dr Glenn Adamson, Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Christie Brown, Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. Andrew Renton, Curator of Applied Art at the National Museum of Wales Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London. Janice West, writer and curator. Calum Storrie, writer and exhibition designer. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.