Creativity, Collecting and Caring in the New Millenium

What qualities mark an object as special? How can special seem so different one example from the next? What compels the acquisition of a work of art? What distinctions are requisite in the collector and in the collected? What stimulates the impulse to accumulate related artifacts, and once that is done, what does custodial responsibility entail for the citizen or the institution?

Through the objects in this show, we aim to point to some of the evaluation and selection processes behind the act of collecting. The material on view, drawn from public, corporate and private domains, bears witnesses to a movement from studio to market, to museum. As objects under scrutiny, these have been chosen repeatedly.

As work executed in silica media, they suffer the kiln experience, being exposed to fire that alters their visual character, chemical make-up and physical structure. Away from the flame, each is chosen or edited by their maker to represent them, their intentions, standards and career aspirations. Some of the artists’ criteria are technical, others are aesthetic. Artists customarily retain some of their best pieces long after completion, as archival embodiments of their achievement.

Out of the artists’ hands, the objects are chosen again as market commodity, circulating in circumstances where they undergo assessment, comparison, analysis, and appraisal.

Frequently, the objects are selected as personal possessions by an individual. They can become symbols of the owner’s pride, but more often, as unique hand made objects, they become vessels for the containment of the owner’s values in domestic contexts.

Professionals and corporations frequently turn to art works for their humanizing presence in the business environment. Whether as family heirlooms or corporate trophies, the objects come to mark associations other than the artist’s. Whether as birthright, legacy, or objects of virtue, they become cherished, protected and privileged as bearers of meaning in circles expanding from individual to family to community and beyond.

When objects are shared on a public level in a museum such as this, they are chosen again, this time by practicing professionals who use the objects to fulfill educative missions in a non-profit covenant with government. They are presented as objects of knowledge, valued for their interpretive potential in disclosing cultural history.

The artifacts are guarded as national patrimony. They are seen to speak of the generation that originated them. Gradually, they are steered into the flow of material we collectively call “Heritage”.

The objects seen here are located at various junctures in this process. We can safely predict two things. First, should these objects survive, their evaluation by posterity will shift and change. Second, in an odd inversion, having been chosen so many times, some of these objects will choose us as hosts, occupying places in our hearts and minds as symbols of excellence, while others will stand as emblems of integrity and expressive purpose.

They inspire us to care for them.

While the clay, glass and enamel objects in this show await your judgement as a form of participation, they continually question who chooses the things we keep and why.

Glenn Allison,
Director