Caz Hildebrand RCA

Based in the UK she originally studied Graphic Design at Brighton before joining the RCA Ceramics and Glass course.

As the starting point for this project, she chose a simple bowl inscribed with a positive message, ‘happiness’, written in Kufic script (Iraq, 9th century, Metropolitan Museum).

Why limit looking at objects to a museum? She reaches for larger audience using a commonplace technology like Google Earth? The limitations imposed by Covid-19 led to a digital response, opening up the potential to communicate.

This led her to envisaging a sitespecific installation, made by extruding the Kufic script into a 15m high structure. It is built using available materials to support the local community, reconnecting with their past, learning new skills, creating jobs, reviving their forgotten heritage. She asks if structures like these can become monuments to forgotten and unknown makers? A new way to build more positive public installations, remembering the past, not by celebrating past battles, but by sharing universal, positive, hopeful messages and championing lost skills and crafts.

Taking this single object allowed her to literally and metaphorically expand an idea. She was able to explore the story of its roots in the ancient Islamic world, its journey to a museum, and then give it new meaning, by returning it to its original home via the digital realm.

Left: Bowl emulating Chinese stoneware 9th Century Iraq.

Below: Caz Hildebrand. From the Ground Up. Plywood and acrylic. 122cm x