The Invisible Vase

 The Crocker Art Museum 2024

Galerist, Istanbul 2024

Clare Twomey’s artwork The Invisible Vase is formed by the cobweb of lines that maps every break of the restored Portland Vase. The Portland Vase is a litany of material processes and fragility, this is embedded in material, human skills and a continual historic collaboration with new and old technologies.

The world renowned Portland Vase sits in the care of the British Museum. Later famously copied by Josiah Wedgwood in 1786, the Portland Vase entered the British Museum in 1810 the 4th Duke of Portland deposited it in the British Museum for safekeeping, where it went on public displays. Thirty-five years later, at 3.45 p.m. on 7 February 1845, a young man named William Lloyd picked up a sculpted stone in the room where the Vase was displayed and smashed both it and the showcase into fragments. Twomey's artwork made in response to the glass vessel is formed of the mending lines of the broken vase. This delicate web of lines is accurate to the shape of the vase and to every line of mending of the vase thanks to being able to make the first 3D scan earlier this year and the incredible access to the British Museum restoration department and their records. The Invisible Vase illuminates an untold history of the impact point of the vase and also tells us of the absolute wonder of this object, not only by its form, but by the human endeavour to share its knowledge and history for the public into the future.

The final artwork made is loyal both to the scale of the vase to the millimetre, its restoration and to the legacy of the Wedgwood Portland made of  Blue Jasper clay to celebrate the moment of its arrival in the UK.