ABSTRACT
Between 2007 and 2012, I was the lead curator of a series of ceramics exhibitions at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). This chapter sets out some of the institutional and personal priorities that led to the development of these exhibitions, considered alongside their intersection with the research of the University of Westminster's Ceramics Research Centre for its project ‘Ceramics in the Expanded Field’. It will consider the nature of ‘the expanded field’, both in terms of its wider implications from the perspective of ceramics itself and from these mima shows. It will conclude by asking what lessons the ceramic field – expanded or otherwise – might learn from these projects, and what the possible gains and losses might be.
