A carved wooden bowl bought on eBay was described by Alice Rawsthorn, Catherine Ince and Cat Rossi. Five makers then interpreted each text without seeing the bowl, producing fifteen objects. The project uses ekphrasis—the translation of a work into another medium—to examine perception, authorship and design.
A critic, a curator and an academic described the same bowl. Their different ways of looking became the material from which the makers would work.
Each description was passed to five makers. With the original object withheld, interpretation became productive: one found object returned as a collection of different things.
A new object emerges from a written account of the bowl. The distance between description and making allows its shape and surface to develop independently of the original.
The project asks where authorship resides: in making, describing, looking or using. Each object is both an interpretation of a text and another version of the found bowl.
