‘All museums have to manage their resources to look after their collections,’ Matt Smith tells me, seated in his office in Konstfack, Stockholm’s prestigious school of art, craft and design. As well as being an artist, working with clay, Smith is a professor of craft at the school, specialising in ceramics and glass, and behind him, just visible through a glass window, a student workshop hums with activity. ‘This means when new objects arrive, there’s a change; it’s more of a stretch. It’s a double move: they bring something new to the museum, but also allow us to review the status of quo of what’s already there.’
For over a decade, Smith has studied the workings of public collections, making ceramics that respond to the peculiarities and patterns of individual institutions, performing exactly this double move he describes. It makes him well versed in the ways in which newcomers to a permanent display might cause a shift, changing, even subtly, how the original objects are seen. And there are, he points out, parallels between human movement and the movement of objects that are more than merely incidental. The way our institutions assimilate difference and new perspectives reflects an openness in society more broadly; a willingness to accommodate change and make space for multiplicity.
Over the years, this fascination with museums has led Smith into the storerooms and archives of numerous institutions, from National Trust properties, where he co-curated Unravelled, inviting artists to respond to historic buildings, to the ambitious project Queering the Museum at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2010, in which he asked how the museum might represent the LGBT lives absent from its public displays. His 2018 exhibition took him to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where he responded to the Glynn Collection of Parian ware, a 360-strong group of Victorian statuary Parian once owned by collector David Glynn, and allocated to the museum by the government. For once, Smith’s creations would not be the only new kids on the block.
Made up predominantly of Parian busts, as well as some full-length portraits, the collection represents figures popularly celebrated at the time – there are eminent figures from history, as well as contemporary Victorians and characters from myth and legend. Perhaps inevitably, this means there are ‘an awful lot of moustaches and uniforms’, as the Fitzwilliam’s curator Helen Ritchie points out, and very few women, but the collection is full of complex stories for an artist such as Smith to respond to, opening up routes into the murky and contested areas of history that have long fascinated him.