CREAM’s Ceramics Research Centre-UK are working in partnership with the V&A on an AHRC-funded, 3-year project titled Future Ecologies of Clay. The research addresses the challenge of collecting expanded clay practices and the ability of UK museums to make them accessible to future audiences; there is currently a significant gap between what is being made and what is represented in collections. 

Many examples of innovative expanded clay practice are transient or mutable; some involve performance, large-scale installation, or audience activity for their completion. However, museums have traditionally prioritized the acquisition of ceramic objects over the complexities of capturing live process-based clay works. 

The principal aim of the research is to ensure that recent and historical examples of ephemeral, live, performative, site-responsive and participatory works in clay can be identified, explored and analysed. To achieve this, the team will explore the extent to which established collecting strategies and taxonomies of museums have succeeded or failed to capture recent process-based work in clay. Identifying the challenges museums face in collecting expanded clay practices will help to inform the ways in which other art and craft practices can be represented to audiences today and in the future. The research is also concerned with the ways in which clay-based museum collections and archives can document, collect, archive and otherwise share contemporary clay artworks that are not permanent objects, and how clay artists can take more responsibility for how their works and practice are represented by museums.

Future Ecologies of Clay will involve creating four new models of practice with four museums; as well as serving as case studies, they will provide new content for each museum’s collection. The perspectives of stakeholders (including museum curators and collection managers, artists and educators) will inform a Collection and Archives Strategy Document. This aims to advance understanding of existing context-specific strategies, structures and practices. In addition to developing new thinking on what kinds of expanded clay practice can be collected and how, it meets the objectives of empowering artists and curators to undertake bolder commission and collection negotiations across the UK and internationally. A book of essays will additionally encapsulate the research findings as an original contribution to wider discourses in the fields of the visual art and museum studies.

To support this important research, the CRC-UK project team are recruiting a Research Fellow with knowledge of material practice, documentation skills and experience of museum collections and archive research. Please click here for further information and apply by 20 August 2025.

The Future Ecologies of Clay team are Project Lead, Professor Clare Twomey, CREAM; Co-Lead, Alun Graves, Senior Curator Ceramics and Glass 1900-now, V&A; Co-Leads Phoebe Cummings, Research Associate and Tessa Peters, Senior Lecturer, CREAM; Consultant Professor Emerita Christie Brown, CREAM; plus two Research Fellows, one based at the University of Westminster, the other at the V&A. 

Link to job details and application form: https://vacancies.westminster.ac.uk/hrvacancies/default.aspx?id=50072350.