March Blog post

As Romy Poletti, one of the lead Ph.D research assistants for the xDX Project, mentioned in her “Captain’s (b)Log,” it is important to understand how we, as researchers, situate ourselves in our work. Thinking more about this, I realized that my relationship with Carleton’s xDX Project is somewhat unique. Unlike others on the research team, I’ve encountered the xDX collection at Carleton both as a research assistant and as a student. As a result, I have had the opportunity of seeing the artefacts from different perspectives.
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In my position as a research assistant, I see the xDX collection at Carleton as a whole. I’ve worked on researching the biographical information for individual artefacts, designers, and companies, but I must also be aware of how they intersect, interact, and influence one another. In preparing artefacts for photo documentation, I’ve handled nearly all the artefacts in the collection and gained a sense of them as a totality. Through my work, I’m forced to think of Carleton’s xDX collection as a collective, united piece of Canadian design history rather than a series of individual objects.
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As a student in co-Director Michael Windover’s class, “Arte/facts of Design History,” I was able to undertake in-depth research on one object, shifting my perspective. I focused my work on a mug produced by Décor Pottery and designed by Gaétan Beaudin. This led me outside the confines of the collection, in search of the mug’s previous context and previous life.

Gaétan Beaudin’s brown Décor Pottery mug. There are other variations of this artefact in Carleton University’s collection.
Etienne Capacchione, xDX Collection, Carleton University

I learned that, while Gaétan Beaudin obtained his formal training in Montreal’s École des Beaux-Arts, he came to reject the Euro-centric and highly theoretical artistic pedagogy of the school.¹ Inspired by Japanese pottery, Beaudin turned his attention more towards materials and process, utility and beauty,² and established a ceramics school in Rimouski, Quebec. Here he constructed his own Japanese-style kiln, which he learned from his visits to Japan. The local magnesium-rich subsoil of the Rimouski area—similar to that used in typical Japanese ceramic works—allowed greater satisfaction in the final product following the firing process.³ With these materials and techniques, he sought to lay a foundation for a professional practice of ceramics that differed from the École des Beaux-Arts.⁴ He aimed to counter the dominant trend of mass-producing what he considered soulless, machine-made objects.⁵

Gaétan Beaudin’s yellowish brown Décor Pottery mug.
Photo: Etienne Capacchione, xDX Collection, Carleton University

Beaudin stressed a learning environment where ceramic works operated as educational tools rather than commodities. Objects, like his Décor Pottery mug, functioned to springboard lines of inquiry, conversation, and critique about the blending of utility, beauty, organicism, and ergonomics. With this in mind, I began to see the mug less as a piece of cool, mid-century design, with its unique contours and integrated handle, and more as a pedagogical instrument. It’s interesting to think that the life of this mug, as a designed object, began in an educational environment and contributed to culture and has now returned to one to contribute to historical work. For my class assignment, my modest contribution to historical work, I created a three-dimensional image of the mug and annotated it. You can check it out here.

One of the exciting things about working with this collection as a student and a research assistant is that I can see how my own contributions add to histories of design in Canada. From my vantage point, I see how the diversity of perspectives from students, professors, art historians, industrial designers, data managers, etc. enrich the xDX project and show how dynamic design history can be.

Dylan Chatelier, Undergraduate RA Carleton University