ABSTRACT
Viewers wander between premade urns, performances and collaborations, artworks produced by students for the elderly. Originally conceived as an exhibition for National Conference on Education in the Ceramic Arts—the largest ceramic gathering in the world—Social Objects features a series of craftworks that challenged, intercepted, interrupted, re-routed, and transformed relationships between people. Utopia becomes a tactic, a gesture, one to be used within existing economic and artistic frameworks for the disruption and transformation of social relations. Socially engaged craft bears similarities to socially engaged art, which takes, as its subject and material, the interstices of human relations that Bourriaud refers to as “relational aesthetics”. Social Objects, an exhibition of work by the Socially Engaged Craft Collective, asked in the form of actions, the world to be different, if only for a second. Social Objects demonstrates that, rather than a peace-filled oasis, utopia is messy, and loud.
