🎧 Future Retrieval: Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis Glen R. Brown

Appears in the March 2025 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

In a twilight-green gallery, a rhesus monkey, milled in maple hardwood and finished in silver leaf, gazes into the lucid moon of a 1920s Paul Frankl Egyptian-fantasy mirror. Competing for his attention in the mirror’s well of simulacra are reflections of ceramic sculptures set on historical furniture: the present resting conspicuously on the past, but also in some cases replicating and transforming it. This mise en scène, excerpted from the exhibition “Close Parallel” at the Cincinnati Museum of Art in 2021, was conceived by Future Retrieval (an ongoing collaboration between artists Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis) with the conviction that adjusting their practice to a particular museum and its collections would generate new concepts, strategies, and forms. Similar to the role of adaptation in the evolution of species, adaptation of art to challenges of specific environments can be a means of innovation. 

Launching New Work 

The genre in which ceramics simultaneously inhabit and engage with museums as spaces of acquisition, classification, conservation, and display has been defined by such now-classic examples as Clare Twomey’s “Forever” exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2011. In that same year, Davis and Parker completed “Still[ed] Life,” their first adaptation of Future Retrieval’s practice to a specific institutional environment, when they received an invitation from the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a new series of exhibitions that encouraged local artists to revitalize art objects from the permanent collection by confronting them with their own. “Our approach to that exhibition,” Parker recalls, “was through the question, could we make our work look like it was part of the museum collection that never changed—so maybe if you were a first-time viewer, you wouldn’t know we were the contemporary show? That opened a path for us to access other collections, to be invited to use, refer to, scan, digitize, and copy objects and then use that experience as a launching point for new work.” 

Future Retrieval’s three most recent projects reflect the conscious adaptation to environments that has characterized a diverse slate of exhibitions since 2011. Leaves of Plates, a 2019 installation at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, invoked the challenge of responding to a collection in which art took the form of illustrations in rare books, principally on subjects in the sciences and particularly on pharmacology. A corollary challenge was presented by the rules of the institution. “The stacks were closed, so we had to use the catalog to find books,” Parker explains. “If a book had ‘leaves of plates,’ we knew it was illustrated.” Eventually, the scope of research narrowed to three primary topics: botany, scientific expeditions, and alchemy. “We would have someone pull up a book for us,” Davis recalls, “then go through it taking pictures of every page.” The resulting archive of images, stored on hard drives, provided inspiration not only for Leaves of Plates, but for Future Retrieval’s next two projects as well. 

Although Davis and Parker were trained as potters at the Kansas City Art Institute before earning their MFAs in ceramics at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio, Future Retrieval’s installations have incorporated “whatever it takes to get the project done.” In Leaves of Plates, a cabinet, once the personal property of the library’s namesakes, housed a set of thrown albarelli decorated with imagery drawn by Parker and Davis from book illustrations and converted into underglaze transfers in Jingdezhen. Interspersed with the jars were water-jet-cut aluminum botanical and mycological silhouettes supported by fistfuls of fired clay. In front of the cabinet, a table displayed thrown and glazed porcelain references to beakers, flasks, and other tools of alchemy. Flanking the cabinet, large cut-outs of insects, plants, and fungi reinforced connections to the library. “Those were reproduced directly from book images,” Davis explains, “but we toyed around with them, trying to use strategies the library would use. It had didactics—pop-up boards and signage. We wanted to be true to the environment, so that you could walk into the main space of the library and continue cohesively into the exhibition.” 

Mutual Adaptation 

Future Retrieval’s adaptation to the Lloyd Library engaged art from the institution’s collections, but only imagistically. The next major project, Close Parallel in 2021, offered the opportunity to integrate fully with some of the holdings of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Working closely with curator Amy Dehan, Davis and Parker selected such objects as the Frankl mirror to interact with sculptures like the rhesus monkey, produced through CAD/ CAM technology from scans Davis made of a specimen in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. That the sculpture had languished unexhibited for several years was not incidental: the project in general incited rehabilitation. “We went down into the basement with Amy over the course of a couple of years and started identifying objects that could go through conservation, go back into the mix,” Parker explains. “We were refreshing some things that were never going to make it to the surface again,” Davis adds. That refreshing, literal as well as figurative, insinuated Parker and Davis deeply into the workings of the museum, directing conservators toward repair and restoration of select objects: the historical furniture on which Future Retrieval’s sculptures would be displayed. Adaptation, in other words, became mutual.

Elkington Crunch—a blue-glazed sculpture of carcasses of a dik-dik and rabbit giving rise to mushrooms (fungi that thrive on dead or decaying matter)—encapsulates the themes of rehabilitation and regeneration that permeated the exhibition. Cast in a mold made from a CAD/CAM-produced matrix, the sculpture takes a thematic cue from a structurally damaged English 1883 Elkington & Co. gilt-bronze tripod that had been out of public view for decades. “Many of the objects we chose happened to be copies,” Parker notes, “so we ended up making copies of copies. The tripod is a 19th-century copy of an 18th-century copy of a tripod discovered at the Temple of Isis at Pompeii.” Future Retrieval’s resurrection of the Elkington tripod from its basement tomb was effected not only through the literal act of restoration, but also through mimicry of the tripod’s legs in clay. 

In another intriguing interaction with the Cincinnati Museum of Art’s holdings, one potentially affecting provenance, Future Retrieval placed on a 1740s French gilt-wood console table a copy of the museum’s 18th-century Kändler-designed Meissen tureen, which some believe to have been a gift from the King of Saxony to the Queen of Naples. “We made ten copies through photographing, 3D printing, mold making, and casting,” Davis says. “Only five made it, and only one didn’t have a crack in the bottom. We went back to the collection and found that the original tureen had a crack in the exact same place. It was an 18th-century design flaw. The porcelain couldn’t handle that kind of curvature. That raises questions. Was this actually a diplomatic gift? Was this the highest quality that Meissen could produce?” 

Future Retrieval’s most recent project, “Crystal-Walled Seas,” (Denny Gallery, New York City, 2022), offered a different kind of challenge to adaptation, given the anonymous white-cube-and-plate-glass nature of the space and lack of a permanent collection. Parker and Davis responded to that challenge partly by mining Future Retrieval’s past research. “Everything started with a book called Ocean Gardens that we found at the Lloyd,” Davis explains, “an amazing, romantic book about aquariums, their history, voyeurism, exploration, ecology, escapism.” Embracing the aquarium as theme, Davis and Parker applied their strategy of “refreshing,” commissioning fabrication of a set of Frankl-style shelves that simultaneously hearkened back to the Cincinnati show and invoked references to the intimate, box-like enclosures of home aquariums to house gongshi-like sculptures they dubbed “swim-throughs.” More important, they employed some of their previous work in creative recontextualization. Key in that respect was Mycology Monday—an assemblage consisting of four CAD/CAM-aided clusters of ceramic mushrooms in a Plexiglas case backed by modified illustrations from the Lloyd Library’s mycological texts. In Close Parallel, Mycology Monday had been paired with a rococo console table to form Consolaraium (an implicit conflation of console and terrarium). Adapted to Crystal-Walled Seas, its Plexiglas case effectively became a fish tank. Looking back, it recalled the glass-doored apothecary cabinet in the Lloyd installation. 

Exploring Roles 

Emphasizing analogies among the cabinet, terrarium, aquarium, and museum vitrine and among the console table, Frankl shelves, tripod, and museum pedestal, Future Retrieval has in recent projects thematized devices for display, exploring their roles in museums as both objects of acquisition and aids to exhibition as well as their historical connections to pharmacological and domestic environments. The theme has been only one among many relevant to ceramics. If clay has not been Future Retrieval’s exclusive medium in these recent projects, ceramic sculptures and vessels have been consistently at the heart of things, inhabiting the enclosures and resting on the devices of display in the museum and gallery as in the world at large. 

the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.