You, Me and Everyone We Know

One by one visitors were invited to sidle their way through thick black-out curtains into an improvised dark room. There, holding a thrown pot carefully above their head, like a trophy, each was invited to take a slow turn through 360°, beneath an intense beam of light. The surface of the pots had been treated with chemicals sensitive to light, and as the visitor turned, an image of their hands became part of the skin of the vessel. In this way, through the help of one hundred friends, neighbours, family members and collaborators, identified here in a wall of photographs, one hundred pots have become an emblem of a community.  

For Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren, the work that matters to them has never simply been the object itself. While, as design studio Glithero, they produce objects - their Les French furniture; their Silverware and Blueware vases, tiles and lampshades; their Woven Song Table Cloths, the patterns dictated by organ music; their Bench Mould Consoles - their central goal, as they express it, is “to foster a deeper understanding of the value that is created in the moment of making.”

This value is something hard to put your finger on. But an apt emblem of it is the idea of a vessel, thrown with skill by one pair of hands, being held aloft with care by another pair of hands, photographed in the turning, and then handed to a third, which places the vessel on a plinth.  To underline this genealogy of value, “You, Me, and Everyone We Know” offers multiple examples of meaning created through the passing of objects between hands.

Words by Emma Crichton-Miller

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