Window Gallery
Installation image
Maker: Janet Green
Courtesy of the artist
Installation image
Maker: Janet Green
Courtesy of the artist
The History of the Cup (clam cup)
05 December 2005 - 18 December 2005
Clam cup is one piece from a series of works created for an exhibition titled The History of the Cup. Working with the basic shape of the cup, such an everyday item, Janet Green wanted to elevate the status of this familiar form, from the ordinary, to the extraordinary. Reminiscing on her years of making domestic pottery with the thrill of seeing rows and rows of repeated shapes lined up for firing, this work takes the forms of everyday domestic pottery and by playing with scale and surface, brings about an element of humour and theatricality. She has always loved the drawings of cups in pattern books from the Potteries and remembers particularly seeing them in the Minton Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, pages of cups of all shapes and sizes with their decorated surfaces. Bringing to this her interest in archaeological ceramics, there are the usual matt glazes. These shapes come from all periods of history and only scratch the surface of the diversity that exists. The earliest ones relate to previous work based on Ancient Greek pottery where again form follows function, but with these pots clearly, the function is purely aesthetic.This installation was part of a series of window displays called ChocolateBox.