The Foundling Museum’s latest exhibition, Self-Made, is a group show reflecting on the complexities of identity and self-determination through the medium of ceramics. The creation of self-identity can be a challenging yet profoundly empowering process – our unique identities are influenced by myriad layers of history, memory and experience. The exhibition brings together work by a curated group of artists who use clay in different ways to explore embodied narratives, the construction of self and the capacity for physical and emotional transformation. Touching on class, gender, sexuality, cultural heritage and historical legacies, each piece represents an intimate interaction between artist and material, moulded, cast and inscribed with new narratives and forms of expression. Employing clay and its associated references, Matt J Smith’s work explores how cultural organisations operate using techniques of institutional critique and artist intervention. He is interested in how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative that presents itself as a fixed and accurate account of the past and how, though taking objects and repurposing them in new situations, or creating ‘lost objects’, this can be brought to light. Of particular interest to him is how museums can be reframed from an outsider perspective, and often from an LGBTQ+ viewpoint. Recent exhibitions include Untold Lives, Kensington Palace, 2024 and Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2020. In this exclusive interview for House Collective Journal, Matt gives a further deep-dive into his practice, and the conceptual genesis of the work on show at The Foundling Museum.
Please can you tell us a little about your journey into art – did you grow up in an artistic environment?
At the time, I didn’t recognise my upbringing as particularly artistic – particularly in terms of the visual arts.However, looking back making was omnipresent – I would sew as did nearly all my aunts and grandparents and my father was an engineer who made himself a boat. When I first left University, I worked in museums.I was studying for an MA in museum studies and was shown an image of work by the African American artist Fred Wilson from his 1992 show Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society. In the exhibition Fred had delved into the museum’s collections and repositioned objects. One of the installations, titled Metalwork 1793-1880, saw an ornate repousse silver tea set juxtaposed with a pair of slave manacles. The poetry of that juxtaposition said so much about the hierarchy and power structures in museums that I realised that I could possibly do more work outside a museum than within one.
You didn’t always focus on ceramic work. Can you give us a brief insight into your route towards that?
When I first started to train as a visual artist, I concentrated on drawing and ceramics. However, sewing always ran alongside.It took me many years to realise that it was as much part of my practice as the ceramics. Since then, I have also worked with print and neon. Much of my work is made in response to museum collections, so often the collection dictates what the artwork should be. Choosing ceramics was a very conscious choice. Having worked in museum conservation departments, I was very conscious how some materials decayed more quickly than others. Wanting to talk about identity and making space for alternative histories made me want to select a medium that was there for the long term. Once fired, clay is going nowhere which is why it forms such a large part of the archaeological digs that tell us about previous societies and ways of being.
What inspired you to retrain as a ceramicist? What do you find most exciting about this medium?
Clay is both incredibly accessible and impossibly difficult. To first work with it, its possibilities are endless.However, as you start to want to control it more and achieve specific aesthetics, you have to gain more and more knowledge and accept that sometimes it will do what it wants, rather than what you want. The level of water in clay dictates how malleable it is. As clay dries it becomes more stable, but less plastic. It’s a dance, and clay will dry at the speed it wants to. It is a real antidote to instant gratification. Clay is a chameleon and can imitate many other materials. Within the show at the Foundling there are a number of pieces made in black Parian. Parian is porcelain with added flux (a glassy material) which melts in the firing giving it a glossy, marble like finish. The flux also makes the clay unstable at the high temperatures needs to achieve the shine – so there are pieces in the show that have moved or slumped during the firings, fusing into neighbours or bending backwards. When these go well, there is a very lively feel to the final pieces.
You currently have various works on show at the Foundling Museum, as part of the group exhibition “Self-Made: Reframing Identities”. Can you talk first about the series Family Romance?
I had just finished a series of plates for Kensington Palace exploring the live of a male Georgian palace worker whose life was left in tatters after being accused of having sex with another man in Hyde Park. The work explored historic and contemporary notions of queer shame and I needed an antidote following it.So I began working on Family Romance which memorialised queer relationships. One of the plates in the exhibition features Fanny and Stella (Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park) who I recently found out lived just behind the Foundling Museum in the 1860s, which was a lovely bit of serendipity. The exhibition is subtitled Reshaping Identities. I’m often drawn back to Andrew Solomon’s book Far from the Tree which explores the relationship between parents and their children who are part of a community that their parents are not part of. Examples in the book include children who are Deaf, children with Dwarfism and LGBTQ children. Some parents embraced this difference and saw it as opening a new world to them, others shut down and found it problematic. There was a divide between parents who wanted to see who their children would be and those who wanted their children to become a mirror of themselves. Family Romance are people I never met, but who I bring with me.
Your ‘reconfigured’ objects are intriguing! We understand you formed them from redundant moulds from the Spode factory in Stoke on Trent. How do you select which moulds you work with, and which you merge?
There is a huge amount of chance as to which moulds I work with.When I went to select moulds, the factory was in pretty much the state it was in when the doors shut on the final day of production.It is cold and dark and there is quite a bit of disorder.Selecting the moulds involved opening each one and seeing what was inside. Once the selected moulds were back in the studio, casts were taken from each and then joined while the clay was still damp before firing.Which casts were joined was based mainly on aesthetics.
Your work explores how history is a constantly selected and refined narrative, and you often also focus on how museums can be reframed. Can you speak to this idea in the context of the Foundling Museum?
I enjoy nothing more than a deep dive into a museum collection and how it is interpreted to explore how the same stories could be approached from a differing point of view, and what this might tell us about where power and authority lies. With the Foundling, there is often a narrative about the terrible moment when a mother gives away her child to the orphanage. Underpinning this is the notion that the best relationship a child can have is with their mother. I go back to Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree, which meticulously unpicks when those parent/child relationships become problematic and the child finds the bonds it needs within a group outside the biological family.
Where would you most love to show your work in future?
What a brilliant question.I’ve been really lucky to work in some of the museums I most love including the Fitzwilliam and the Pitt Rivers.However, I would really like to dig into the queer narratives of Frederic Leighton at Leighton House or May Morris at Kelmscott Manor.
Are there any upcoming projects you can discuss at this point?
I’ve been working with Holocaust Centre North exploring the effects of the Holocaust on LGBTQ people.When the allies liberated the concentration camps, gay men who had not served their whole sentence were moved straight from camp to prison and were often ostracised by their families when eventually released from prison. Queer persecution was present before and after the Nazis, it was just more punitive during their reign.
The work includes a large tile piece where each tile includes the name of a queer man who died in the brickworks at Sachsenhausen camp. During the firing, these names disappear, and the viewer has to trust that they were ever there. It’s been hard, but incredibly rewarding work and will form part of an exhibition – Memorial Gestures in the summer of 2025.
Matt J Smith is exhibiting alongside Phoebe Collings-James, Rachel Kneebone, Renee So in the exhibition Self-Made: Reshaping Identities at the Foundling Museum, until 1 June 2025. For more information visit here.
Images (tp to bottom): Notes From A Love Song (Bocage) 2022, courtesy of the artist; Self Made installation shot by Fernando Manoso; Bird Boy (2022) courtesy of the artist; Self Made installation shot by Fernando Manoso
