Curator Tessa Peters gives new look to Anthony Shaw's ceramics room at CoCA

The original display of ceramics and art selected from the Anthony Shaw Collection by the collector and clothes designer himself has made way for a new one created by independent curator Tessa Peters that reflects Shaw's response to innovation in British ceramic art.

In making the selection, Peters has chosen to feature a number of Shaw’s most recent acquisitions, from Gordon Baldwin, Kerry Jameson, Nao Matsunaga and Sara Radstone, while considering their relationships to earlier works, both their own and with those of other significant figures such as Ewen Henderson and Gillian Lowndes.

Curator Tessa Peters and collector Anthony Shaw in the Anthony Shaw Room at the Centre of Ceramic Art, York Art Gallery

Ceramics, paintings, sculptures, textiles and souvenirs sit together harmoniously within the domestic-style space created by Shaw and designer Martin Smith, and now, in her display, University of Westminster tutor Peters demonstrates how personal collections can continually transform our homes.

Shaw has built up his collection over decades and has loaned it to York Art Gallery for display in an environment set up to look like his own living room, and now he will choose a curator every year or 18 months to present a different perspective over the remaining 12 years of the loan.

Where Shaw had sought to give a general overview, Peters has focused on what she likes, replacing two thirds of the room's artwork, making it more sculptural while also introducing silks, photographs and glass.

Explaining why he asked Peters to be his first guest curator, Shaw says: "I have known Tessa for a very long time and likewise she has known most of the artists for most of her career."

Nimbus VI, by Gordon Baldwin

Peters recalls: "When I first knew Anthony it was when I was first starting out in the art world after university and I'd just begun working in a gallery in West London. Anthony's design workshop was in North End Road, West Kensington, where he'd put together a window display with ceramics on show as a way for people to get to know the artists."

Shaw's career in design has since come full circle. "I am back in that space working as a designer once more," he says.

"When I came to look at Anthony's new acquisitions, I saw his shelves of fabrics for the first time and we chose the ones you now see on display in York," says Peters.

Unknown Unnatural Unreal, 2015, by Nao Matsunaga

She also felt it was important to represent how Shaw continues to add new works to his collection. "I wanted to show it was a 'live' collection," she explains.

To emphasise the point, only the day before they visited York Art Gallery to oversee the opening of the revised room, Shaw had acquired two Gordon Baldwin pieces. "Once I'm gone, that's when the acquisitions will stop," he says.

He is delighted with Shaw's curatorial response to his collection. "I keep saying I am amazed by how the room now looks, and that's because I am," he says. "I've been with Tessa right through the creation of this room and as it's grown around us, I think it's now even more domestic than my own first display."

"When one person is selecting the works, there's an interesting cohesion to that selection," suggests Peters. "I kept saying to Anthony, 'it's not a gallery space, but a domestic space'. In a gallery space, you tend to separate things and they exist alone; in a domestic setting, they tend to mix more."

"Previously I was just trying to give an idea of the collection, giving a sense of the whole, whereas Tessa can pinpoint aspects," says Shaw. "The room has gained immeasurably from having a curator."

Pinning Down Beauty, by Kerry Jameson

The new pieces on show vary from the work of Nao Matsunaga, a Japanese ceramicist who trained at the Royal College of Art, to two works by Kerry Jameson that were made in Australia and "have an aboriginal feel to them".

"The work has to be so full of meaning," says Shaw, who uses Gordon Baldwin's pieces as an example. "Gordon has gone blind now but he's always been so prolific and his daily practice has always been 'marking' and still is, so there's a poetic quality to his titles now, such as A Marks Day After Day."

Looking ahead to potential curators in the years ahead, Shaw concludes: "I'd like to have children selecting the objects for the room one time, where each child would write about one of the pieces. I think that's something you would remember in your life, thinking about an object in a way you would never otherwise do."