Memoranda

Memoranda is an exhibition that brings together innovative artworks by contemporary makers, with archival material from the Crafts Study centre collection. Memoranda are agreements, reminders, plans that refer to the past to inform the future. Curators Tessa Peters and Janice West contend in this exhibition that craft objects offer an excellent opportunity to study the transfer or recreation of memory through artefacts.

The curators introduced four visual artists to the archives and collections of the Crafts Study Centre, a significant repository not just of British craft objects of the 20th and 21st centuries, but also their creators' test pieces, sketches, source materials, notes and documents. The artists each have a distinctive and innovative practice that explores the power and significance of material culture. They were invited to select items that particularly interested them from the collection and to use the ideas, histories and evocations that these objects produced for them as a spur to new work.

An accompanying book with a foreword by Professor Daniel Miller and contributions by the artists, curators and Dr Glenn Adamson, Chair of the Crafts Study Centre, is available.