Curatorship & Exhibitions
For the 1997 International Ceramics and Seminar I created Hogarth's China, a ground-breaking exhibition showing how William Hogarth incorporated inanimate 'pots' into his human narratives. The exhibition transfered two years later to the Wedgwood Museum. Today it remains the subject of one of my most popular talks, Harlots, Rakes and Crashing China.
[Originally sponsored, along with my book, by the Royal SunAlliance.]
In 2005 York Museums' Trust asked me to devise three separate exhibitions under the umbrella title Celebrating Ceramics:
- Fired Up - from five millenia, 400 pots (from 12,000) arranged by function (York Art Gallery);
- A Passion for Pots - the W A Ismay Collection (Wakefield Art Gallery); and
- FirePlace - mostly modern pots combined with the pictures at Scarborough Art Gallery
Later, during my tenure at The Foundling Museum, along with distinguished guest curators and designers (and with grants from generous donors) we prepared and mounted some notable exhibitions including:
- George Frideric Handel (in-house curator, K Hogg, Gerald Coke Collection)
- Matt Collishaw, Tracey Emin and Paula Rego (curator Gill Hedley)
- Threads of Feeling -Fabric Tokens (curator John Styles);
- Foundling Voices (testimony of the former pupils from the Foundling Hospital School)
- Vauxhall Gardens Exhibition (curators David Coke and Alan Borg)