Pas de deux

In 2010-2011 Potter worked on collaborative commission 'Pas de Deux' with jeweller Lin Cheung, as part of museumaker: a prestigious national initiative promoting partnership between makers, museums and visitors. Museumaker involved 16 UK museums and was supported by The Arts Council and the MLA. Potter & Cheung were selected by curator James Beighton, on behalf of mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art). The artists utilised the objects and expertise available across three Middlesbrough museums. Together with local residents, the museum collections were interrogated as a means to explore issues around commissioning contemporary craft. The Pas de Deux project involved participatory workshops and an intensive consultation period with selected Middlesbrough residents. Subsequently artefacts were made in (non-identical) pairs: one was retained by the resident and the other donated to the museum’s extensive contemporary jewellery collection. This project explored a number of important issues around personal versus public ownership, and was significant for challenging the typically static nature of public collections. In particular, the work ‘Charlotte’s Choice’ enables a periodic exchange of objects between the museum and an individual. Curator James Beighton regards this ‘exchangeable collection-artefact’ as unique within a museum context. This work also extends the related themes of beads as currency, exchange as embodied within 'gift giving', and the value of elementary structures of sociality (such as reciprocity) within contemporary culture. The entire project was shown as part of The Modern Jewel: In time and the mind of others (March – July 2011), which was the first major jewellery exhibition for mima, and included work by renowned artists Ted Noten and Maisie Broadhead. The exhibition was reviewed in Crafts magazine (May/June 2011) and the Association for Contemporary Jewellery publication Findings (Spring 2011). The project has also featured in talks given by the curator in various international symposia. This constitutes a second inclusion for Potter in mima’s contemporary jewellery collection. Her work is also in the collections of the Crafts Council, British Council, Galerie Marzee and National Museums of Scotland. Museumaker: http://www.museumaker.com/makers/cheung-potter-noten mima: http://www.visitmima.com/exhibitions/pastdetail.php?id=7