Pottery in Museums : How, Why and What do we exhibit?

Abstract

This thesis is a study of pottery in the museum world. Throughout the study, questions along the lines of how, why and what we exhibit are brought up and answered. The study is done through observations and interviews with seven different museums, four of which are located in Sweden and three in Italy. The author has also used museological literature and theories in order to strengthen the essay and show that the issues brought up in the observations are known since before in the field, but still exist in the museums today.The exhibiting of pottery comes with several issues, such as overcrowding of displays, requirements of pre-knowledge from the visitors, aesthetical problems with broken, coarse or fine pottery and epistemological prob-lems. Epistemology is a subject that seems to be partly ignored in the observed museums, despite it being general knowledge that fewer visitors will read the text the longer it is. Other epistemological problems that are brought up are the issues of text placement, vocabulary and actual mediated information. These problems are brought up throughout the essay and explained, with a smaller section that discusses possible improvements to them, which have been brought up by researchers in the field.In interviews with curators of the museums, thoughts about what the visitors see and understand compared to what the museums want them the see are presented. Also their views on the possibilities of interaction with pottery as a mediator and whether they focus primarily on aesthetics or learning in the exhibitions are shown. This essay is not meant to be a decider between what is right or wrong concerning the exhibiting of pottery, but could be used as a stepping-stone towards such studies. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

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