I like to box things and put labels on the outside. It makes me feel organised. It’s a psychological sticking-plaster over my anxieties around mess and disorder.

The Crafts Study Centre is a space full of boxes, and the boxes contain ‘documents’ that trace the lives and works of important craftspeople. It is an archive; it is a place of safe-keeping for the past, and it does not discriminate in the same way that a collection or retrospective publication might. It The archive does not hold preserve just the ‘good’, the ‘valuable’ or the ‘exemplar’, it preserves everything because the archive is not given to subjectivity. It stores evidence of life, whether regardless of qualitative judgment. The CSS has personal photographs, receipts, invoices, shopping lists; private fragments are as might be as important as major works to someone engaged in some kind of research. In an archive, you keep everything, because you never know when someone might find it useful.

In the CSS there are some documents that are described as ‘spoilt’ or m mistakes in some way. There are tests and experiments; the things you make on the way to making the ‘good’ work. There is a small box (like a shoe box) containing test-glazed pots by Lucie Rie. It is rough and unglamorous. Rummaging through the tissue paper and unwrapping the tiny vessels feels like you are rifling through LR’s handbag, mak or reading her diary. It feels like you are handling things that were never meant to be seen, let alone shown or revered (studied?).

And so it is this box and its contents that bring me to the idea of my own ‘archived’ work; the issue of containment and control over how future generations might engage with what I have made.

Note: I will never be Lucie Rie and I am not trying to pretend that my work will ever warrant the level of preservation and scholarship that her practice deserves enjoys. But in a way that’s part of the point: I don’t expect my work to to be archived in the Crafts Study Centre or its equivalent, and so I am doing archiving it myself, or at least some of it. I am archiving the bits that will never be written about because they ar remain as are fragments of ideas, which I can’t or won’t continue. They are my equivalents to LR’s test glazes, because these are test ideas. They have informed or stimulated other ideas, but in themselves they remain unfinished. (incomplete, unresolved In fact there are many words to describe their state of these ideas, unfinished, incomplete, unresolved, mistaken, aimless, exhausted, forgotten – Why are these ideas not resolved?

For various reasons, these ideas have stopped, or rather I have stopped think working on them. They all present me with problems of one sort or another, but because they are still hanging around it is difficult to stop thinking about them. But there are a lot of other things to think about right now, and these ideas are just taking up valuable head-space. I’m going to ‘finish’ them all, by putting them all in neat little boxes with numbers and labels so they can be archived and forgotten: not for negative, but for positive reasons.