Abstract

This article analyzes a body of artworks that address the historical and contemporary aspects of a collection of ethnographic objects. Ossify (2009), a glass sculpture, was commissioned by Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens for its permanent collection and exhibited in Collected Fragments (2009-10), an international group exhibition focused on artists working creatively with taxonomy and collection. The paper describes the development of an 'ethno/graphic' method, to provide an example of an artistic interpretation of museum ethnography, and to make explicit a technique that embeds graphic images in glass. This project revealed Sunderland's connections to selected artefacts by describing how the objects have been handled, and showed how these connections may be visualised in a body of glass artworks. This is a revised version of a paper given at ‘Making Things’, the annual conference of the Museum Ethnographers Group, hosted by and held at the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, 12–13 April 2010. This article is due to be published in April 2012.