IAA - Re-encountering Heritage: Exploring new methods of heritage and museum engagement through creative practice

This project builds upon two related practice-led research projects. The first explores the endangered tacit knowledge and material culture of post-war ceramic figurine production in Seto City, Japan. This project employs art-archaeological approaches to investigate and raise awareness of this important, yet neglected, chapter of Japanese design history. This has resulted in a range of practice-led (research artefacts and exhibitions) and published outputs (symposia, conferences, articles), and was submitted to REF21 as a multi-component output. The project aims to generate new approaches to materialising knowledge through the production of novel forms of cultural artefacts (artworks and collected object assemblages) and exhibitions. This explores the creative potential of otherwise obsolete material culture as a generative store of memory, focusing particularly on the reuse of ceramic waste material and plaster production moulds. By engaging with a range of museum professionals and creatives, the research aims to highlight the significance and ongoing potential of this cultural heritage. The ultimate goal is to affect change by leading to new museum preservation and interpretation practices in Japan. This will result in new audiences, potentially enhancing Seto’s cultural and tourism offering. The project has potential to lead to official recognition of this heritage as being archaeologically and culturally significant. The second project concerns the George Brown Collection of ethnographic objects from the Pacific, at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan, which I will research as part of an upcoming AHRC international fellowship. The collection has a complex and contested history. As a decontextualised assemblage, the collection provides a unique opportunity to explore wider issues relating to the ongoing relevance and position of ethnographic collections. During the fellowship, I will explore 3D scanning as a means of recording objects in the collection in an accessible and potentially shareable format which can be utilised for creative purposes. This will complement the NME’s own initiatives around participation and engagement related to the development of a multimedia database. This builds upon work in Seto where I have piloted these approaches to document threatened material culture and former production sites. Of particular interest are objects in the collection where the stylistic influences from both the originating community and European colonizers are manifest. These hybrid, transitional objects materialise the entangled relationship between material culture and socio-cultural change. This research will complement my work in Seto, Japan, where I have become interested in the chain of operations relating to the commissioning, design and production of figurines. The George Brown collection provides a similar insight into the material trajectories of colonialism, and the visual culture of encounter.