Plate from 'The Cook Service' depicting a man wearing a mask, earthenware with custom decal prints and oxides, Matt Smith, Graiguenamanagh, County Kilkenny, Ireland, 2020

Plate of glazed white earthenware with custom decal prints in brown and pink, and oxide decoration in green to rim. The central image is a portrait of a man of the Hawaiian Islands wearing a mask, this taken from a print by Thomas Cook after John Webber, captioned 'A man of the Sandwich Islands, in a mask.'

The plate is part of 'The Cook Service', a dinner service made by Matt Smith in the manner of 18th-century Wedgwood creamware, which was made for his exhibition 'Losing Venus' at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 4 March - 29 November 2020. The service was subsequently shown by Cynthia Corbett Gallery at Collect 2023, London, 1 - 5 March 2023, from where eight plates from the service were acquired by the V&A. Smith describes 'The Cook Service' as 'the celebratory service that Wedgwood never made'. It takes as its starting point images and portraits recorded on the voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific, the first of which began in 1768. Cook's expeditions were voyages of scientific discovery, and had the initial aim of recording the transit of the planet Venus as seen from Tahiti, from which the distance from the Earth to the Sun could be deduced. But they also served the purposes of colonial expansion, with land being claimed for the British Empire. 'The Cook Service' critiques the colonialism of Cook's expeditions, and considers in particular the subsequent impact of Empire on how people were be able to love, including the criminalisation of male-to-male sexual relations. The imagery on the plates of 'The Cook Service' juxtaposes images made by John Webber, the artist on Cook's third Pacific voyage, with images of Venus, the Roman godess of love. The Webber images, printed in brown, were taken from the Atlas to accompany Captain James Cook's account of his voyages to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1776-1780, held in the Met Office Library, which supplied digital copies to Smith. The images of Venus, printed in pink, were obtained from internet searches made by Smith, and digitally manipulated by him.

Made for the artist's solo exhibition 'Losing Venus' at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 4 March - 29 November 2020. The plate formed part of 'The Cook Service'.

C.104-2023