Boundary Objects

About

On Saturday 19th November ‘Boundary Objects’, a new contemporary art exhibition, opens to the public at the Curwen Print Study Centre in Great Thurlow.  The exhibition presents the work of two Cambridge School of Art students, Ayeshah Zolghadr and Sarah Strachan, who were recently awarded the Arts Scholars Curwen Printmaking Bursary.  The artists have used their bursary to collaborate on this project resulting in an exhibition of collaborative works in print and ceramics in conversation with the Curwen’s unique print archive.

While Sarah’s work often converses with the vessel and concepts of the strangely familiar or familiarly strange, for Ayeshah it is the concept of the grid by abstraction. Drawing on theory from sociology, and science and technology studies, the duo recognise the vessel and the grid as boundary objects where ‘information [is] used in different ways by different communities for collaborative work through scales’ (Star and Griesman, 1989)[1]. A defining feature of boundary objects is their ability to ‘tack back and forth’ between being specific and abstract, which for the artists invokes the action of the printing press. Their proposition being that by translating their respective boundary objects through a conversation informed by the back and forth rhythm of a print press, they might resolve some of the anxiety of working across disciplines.

[1] Star SL., Griesemer JR. Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science. 1989;19(3):387-420